The Long Road to War
"Bearing thirteen degrees west, two degrees elevation," Niduen said quietly, peering through her scope. "Negligible windage. Range: 2200 meters."
The red outline of a deer ambled across a muddy hill. Transparent red leaves broke up its shape just enough to be a challenge. "I see it," Illentha murmured." Her cheek was pressed against the rubber stock. "It's marked."
Illentha breathed normally, setting the crosshairs and touching the trigger. The rifle stilled.
Thwipt.
A second later, the tree canopy shuddered and the deer's chest cavity was blown out, revealing nothing inside. Niduen breathed out. "I worried it wasn't the puppet."
Illentha cycled the bolt, her white parka whispering over the slush they laid in. It was a tiny hollow on the far side of a hill overlooking a wide area of lower ground. Their rifles were propped in notches cut from the dirt embankment, the muzzles draped with scraps of white cloth tied to the barrel.
Niduen went back to surveying the landscape. Harry had released forty ostentatiously-enchanted puppets of wildlife into the forest below. They were enchanted to emit a similar body heat and vitality signature to humans. She reached up and touched her headset to switch channels.
"Team four to all, we got a deer puppet."
"Acknowledged," came the reply, clear as if Arya had spoken to her from inches away. She switched back to channel four. Five minutes later, she heard in her ear.
"Team six to all, raccoon on lase survived one green-tip. Focus fire."
Niduen observed the outline of a raccoon light up bright gold through the canopy. She swung her rifle over to it and clicked through the filters. It scampered through the forest, passing behind trees and bounding over roots erratically. She thumbed the aim lock button and watched the diamond segments close. Before she managed to shoot, something skittered off an invisible shield, flaring it into visibility for the barest moment. Niduen pulled the trigger. Next to her, Illentha did the same.
The raccoon puppet was torn apart.
An hour later, Niduen once again wore the dirty clothes expected of humans. The skins were itchy and still resembled the animals they'd been cut from too much for her to ignore. Du Vrangr Gata were privileged among humans, but she, an elf of no particular significance, had lived in greater luxury than Nasuada herself. Illentha in particular found wearing animal skin revolting and refused to do it. She wore illusions over her bodysuit and kept everyone at arm's length.
Harry hadn't gotten back yet from 'Fireside Chats,' he called it. That evening, Niduen could hear the rough translation of an Urgal folktale rolling over the campfires.
"Did you ladies get food?" a human asked unprompted. One of the new paper plates was clutched in his hand, laden with chicken and pasta. Illentha wrinkled her nose.
"-We're fine," Niduen interrupted before Illentha could say something incredibly offensive. She drew out a dull flavored wafer from her pocket and let its dense energy flood through her.
"He's not going to go away," Illentha said to her, gesturing at the man's eyes. Whoever he was, he was having a hard time keeping his gaze from straying.
Niduen sighed and reached out with her mind. Wardren was lusting over the two unattached women, and harbored ambitions about getting in bed with both of them at once. "Slytha," she murmured. Wardren collapsed into the ground, spilling tomato sauce and mud all over himself.
"Niduen!" Illentha gasped, a devious smile on her face. "I didn't know you had it in you."
She shifted. Wardren was not going to leave without very blatant rejection and Niduen did not like interpersonal conflict. "Let's go be seen with Trianna."
"Unfaithful to Eragon?" Illentha teased. Niduen glared. "Sorry, it's just so odd to be able to casually lie."
Despite being universally known among elves, the human common tongue was nearly never spoken outside of education for the implication that it was only useful for deceit. Illentha was the sort of elf who was very, very thrilled to be free of the strict societal restrictions of elvish culture. Were it not for the fact that humans had serious hangups over same-sex relationships–something that could actually get Illentha branded an outcast–Niduen was certain Illentha would be tempting a new beautiful woman to her tent every night.
Trianna was a very different woman from the social climber Harry had warned them to expect. Niduen suspected the change had only come with the sorceress's arrival at the top of the ladder. Now that she had been publicly honored by King Orrin and would-be Queen Nasuada, she was less grasping and more self-assured. Her magical skills had been expanded and she obviously relished the current state of affairs where she was better than select elves at certain branches.
Du Vrangr Gata was set up in a covered wagon. Niduen stepped up to the top of the cart and into the warm interior.
"-was thinking about how to cut down on cases of the common cold and infections," Harry was saying. "It'll be a couple hours until the sun goes down, so I thought we could all do a project together and build a mobile bath house, and maybe a kitchen, too. It'll be good practice, and my nose will thank me."
"It'll hardly be the strangest task I've done," Trianna nodded. "Did you know that Nasuada's been having us weave magical lace of late? We're already drowning in gold. I know; I've seen the war chests. Has she told you how cheap running an army is when it costs nothing to feed?"
"Yeah, she has. I have to say Trianna, what you've managed without a wand is amazing. Making more is creeping higher and higher on my to-do list, but I imagine it will have to wait until we get to the Burning Plains. I've gone and signed myself up to work through the night and most of the day for the Varden like an idiot, so I'm pretty much out of time."
"You could delegate," she offered. "I know I've been happy to dole out unenjoyable tasks to others in Du Vrangr Gata."
Harry raked his fingers through his hair. "Maybe, but I want to know how to make wands. I guess I'll ask someone."
"Building project?" Filvendor's voice came from behind Niduen. "What is it this time? Aqueduct? Vertical farm?"
"Showers and toilets," Niduen said dryly.
"Nobody wants to poop in a hole," Harry crossed his arms. "And camp is stinky and sweaty."
Filvendor raised his hands. "You'll hear no complaints from me. When do we start?"
"If no one has objections, right now."
Du Vrangr Gata was a bit frazzled by the informality of it. A few of them still had duties. Carn was working in the healer's tent and Imladris was off doing whatever she did to keep Nasuada safe. It was still early in the evening, when Harry led Niduen and her colleagues out to a cleared area in the camp and got to work.
"How many of you have any skills with transfiguration?" Harry started. Only Trianna raised her hand.
"It must be much easier with a wand, but I can barely manage enough to make it useful," she admitted.
"We can work with that, I suppose," Harry nodded. "Bathrooms first, I think, and if there's time after, we can do the kitchens. You've no doubt noticed that the first practical limit of spatial expansion charms is the aperture; the doorway can only be as big as the structure it's set into. When we discuss something large enough to serve the entire Varden, it's got to have a fairly large opening, and tents are the easiest way I've come up with, though I welcome ideas."
Nothing leapt to Niduen's mind, so she kept silent. Harry set about withdrawing a thick bolt of canvas on a roll taller than he was. Bargruuf cheerfully helped roll it out onto the trampled grass. Filvendor suggested thirty meters as long enough for the Varden, and Trianna was given the honor of cutting the canvas from the roll.
Harry suggested hollow aluminum poles for supports and allowed for an arch every five meters. Niduen volunteered to sew the sleeves that held the poles to the main roll. A few men wandered over to watch them work.
"Will the baths be separated by sex?" Illo asked.
Harry hummed. "I was thinking of putting entryways on both sides to maximize surface area. I suppose the short ends can be for women. There are so many more men than women in the camp that the entire side would be overkill."
They had an empty tent by sunset. Harry demonstrated the suite of material improvement charms he was using to them, a dizzying list of thirty-seven charms and enchantments, some of which Niduen found nigh impossible to cast. Presumably a wand helped. Trianna and Bargruuf proved the best at it, though it took them a lot longer to get through the list. Harry made it seem effortless; if he hadn't been vocally pronouncing the incantations for their benefit, Niduen had the impression he'd have done the whole list in under a minute.
"You cast these for everything?" Bargruuf demanded incredulously.
"Things I want to last, so yeah," Harry agreed. "It's a lot, but this stuff's just been rendered invincible by anything under the sun without serious, deliberate effort and an education in curse-breaking. Some of these enchantments may be redundant; I think unbreakability covers oxidization, and rust isn't even an issue with aluminum, but the idea is that once you master the spells well enough to do unconsciously, you can just slap the whole set on anything you make and trust that it's never, ever going to break."
Ealyi blew everyone but Trianna away when it came to spatial expansion. Harry claimed there was a mental twist that helped with the spell they were using, but Niduen just couldn't grasp the concept. Keeping 'Euclidean' geometry out of her head, as Harry called it, was so unintuitive to her, she was basically relying on the incantation to invoke the experience of others who actually understood what the magic was doing. She discovered that without giving the spatial expansion spell any parameters for interior surfaces, it would either take on the material of the surface touching it (the ground inside ended up trampled grass) or in the case of the roof, which was touching nothing, it produced a mind-bending image of what the charm was actually doing to space, which reinforced Niduen's certainty that she was never, ever going to figure it all out.
"For the sake of brevity, I'll do the transfiguration and you guys can get to practicing enchanting the plumbing," Harry announced before turning the floor and walls to bare clay. "I was thinking tile, it has to be waterproof and linoleum is too slippery. Marble feels wrong for a public bathhouse."
"I have no objections," Trianna said.
Piles of ceramic squares appeared. "Go wild," Harry grinned. "And don't feel bad if it looks terrible. Mistakes are part of the learning process."
Niduen began work on a mosaic of Chibi and Cthulu, her sheep back home in Ellesmera. Harry walked them through the color change charm to tailor their tiles to whatever mosaics they were working on.
"Wow," Carn announced. "That is way better than mine." Carn, who had come late to the project, had produced a hexagon tessellation design. Niduen couldn't help but notice that he was not a student of color theory. "At least Harry's isn't much better."
That was true. Niduen had assumed the wizard possessed some artistic talent; the stuff he made with magic tended to be beautiful, but his mosaic was ambitious far beyond the scope of his talent. He'd tried to produce an image in the likeness of six humans, but only the vaguest details came through, and they all looked suspiciously jagged.
"If you shade the tiles on the border of a shape between both sides, it will make it look more natural," Niduen offered.
Harry winced. "Yeah, fairths make this so simple, I had no idea it was this hard."
"Where are we getting the water from? Conjuration?" Trianna asked.
"Yeah, here's the spell, or if you're having trouble, scratch these runes into the showerhead. They've worked for me, but I don't know if that's normal."
Virien had some logistical suggestions to make that got incorporated: rather than having a bunch of rows of stalls and an entry/exit point all along the aperture, half was for incoming traffic, the other was outbound, and inbetween, the bathrooms and showers formed a loop. Harry was careful to interview an Urgal chieftain, Nar Garzhvog about what Urgals needed to clean themselves, polish their horns, and the like, and very obviously incorporated it into the interior, sized with Kull in mind. There were shelves lower on the walls for dwarves, too.
Harry had ambitiously set the goal of at least one daily shower for every member of the Varden's camp, which worked out to currently a bit over 30,000, but the dwarves had not yet joined, which would further swell the numbers. The proposition to make more was accepted, but the practical difference between 10,000 and 30,000 was a lot less than Niduen might have imagined. It was an outrageous scale; the entire capital city of Ellesmera had far less permanent residents. Even during Agaeti Blodhren, Niduen would not have guessed much more than 8,000 elves total had been present.
The exact mechanism or how it worked was lost on her, but the gist was that they only had to make one, inclusive suite that did everything, and spatial and temporal magic would replicate it for everyone. Harry tried to explain it – Niduen vaguely understood that rather than two boxes that shared a single interior, the enchantment would let the interior of the single bathroom exist in infinite instances, all of which coexisted by the doorway. The testing gave her nightmares; one of the tests suggested if two people exited the doorway at the same time, their bodies would be merged and mangled together as they both tried to occupy the same space at the same time, but the kinks were ironed out before anyone was allowed to go in and out. The enchantment hurt to think about, and Ealyi and Harry labored over a floor plan diagram of the finished design for almost an hour, painstakingly writing out exceptions to the enchantment.
"At this point, would it not be simpler to do this the mundane way?" Filvendor wondered.
Harry gnawed on the back of his pencil, scribbling a note over an 'everful bottle of shampoo.' "Maybe," he allowed. "But it's going to be hardest the first time. The concept of parallel instances of the same space have far-reaching implications, I'm just blanking on specific ideas right now. And the more people who can get clean in parallel, the less time has to be reserved in camp for waiting in line, thus the further the Varden can get each day."
In the end, the bathhouses were a hodge-podge of masterful tilework next to a mess of amateur mistakes. Some places were busy and colorful, others were simple and subdued. Harry had gotten it in his head that the number of people the bathhouse was going to serve meant he could cram features inside, and only Filvendor's reminder that the thing needed to be useful to more simple folk than he was used to kept it moderately reasonable. Clothes discarded to clean oneself were automatically laundered, pictographic diagrams on how to properly brush teeth, apply deodorant, lather shampoo, and so on.
"This was an odd project," Trianna reflected. "When I began to learn from your books, Harry, I'd expected to become some legendary battle-mage, not a plumber."
"It do be like that, sometimes," Harry agreed. "Wizards and witches where I'm from tended to be so weird, I think you've just had the insight into why. Magic is a tool that solves nearly anything. We might have spent an hour enchanting toilets, but now 30,000 people won't have to shit in holes and grow stinkier and stinkier until this campaign ends or we reach a big river or something."
"Magic calls us to be masters of everything," Trianna agreed.
Harry tilted his head. "I don't think so," he disagreed. "Look at my tile-work. I am clearly no master at tiling. I can produce mosaics that would make Michaelangelo weep–with envy, not horror–but that's using magic as a stand-in for skill. I think it's more accurate to say magic gives us mastery of everything. The better you get at it, the less functional an understanding of the world you need to make things happen. Wizards tended to be idiots about everything except magic, and I think that's why. Long ago, they stopped needing to know anything else."
"Your home must have been a paradise," Carn said, awed.
Niduen and Filvendor glanced at each other knowingly.
"Nope," Harry disagreed immediately. "To be human is to find problems with your life. Something will come up. There are problems magic can't fix, and a certain amount of them, it will never be able to fix. No one could bring back the dead, create true love, fix cursed injuries, or conjure food. Some I expect can be figured out, but magic will never be able to replace the most basic sentient experience of interpersonal relationships, community, and society. And I'm glad it can't. What else would be left to strive for?"
Everyone assembled outside the finished bathhouse. The sun had set, and most of the crowd that had assembled to watch the mysterious Du Vrangr Gata had filtered away. "Right," Harry announced. "Everyone did amazing today, and I hope everyone learned something." Du Vrangr Gata generally nodded.
"I hope we can do more of these projects together. It occurs to me that there's not often cause for this many magicians to be in one place in Alagaesia, and I think it'll be great to make the most of our time together, learning from each other. Some of you are tired from a long day–the last day before we march–so all of you should go get some rest. Tomorrow, we can do the kitchens, and then I'd like to hear your ideas for projects, too. Great work, everyone."
As the human magicians drifted away, Niduen heard conversation drift back to her.
"He makes me feel so much more skilled than I think of myself," Carn was saying to someone. "But then I realize how skilled he is, and wonder if I can't get there myself, too."
"Pity for those poor Empire magicians, then," Bargruuf chuckled. "They don't get to learn any of this stuff, and they're going to have to fight us."
When the last of the humans had filtered out, Harry led Niduen and her fellow elves into his tent. Elva and Arya were wandering through the nexus when they entered. Firnen was not with them, he disliked the undivided attention of the entire Varden, their smelliness (hopefully a non-issue now), and being bothered. He had yet to build up the mythos Saphira had, and his ego was not quite so overinflated as hers. A couple of appearances with Arya during Fireside Chats was enough for everyone to be heartened by a second dragon's allegiance.
"How was it?" Arya asked.
"Really good," said Harry. "Better than I'd hoped. No issues with raw strength, Trianna has learned way more than I'd hoped, and everyone worked together well."
"You look happier," Elva remarked. "I can't be sure, though."
Arya sighed. "I'm not going to forbid you from using your innate abilities, Elva, but I saw what happened when we visited last time and you took off the bracelet to read Nanny. Come on, it's bedtime and Harry has a busy night ahead of him."
Elva yawned. "Fine."
Niduen suppressed the instinct to squee and hug Elva. Harry scooped her up and kissed her shining forehead, then passed her off to Arya.
"Here's the deal," he announced once they settled in the huge workshop. "Nasuada agreed to the road-paving plan. The route we take is going to be torn up by the Varden, so we might as well get something useful out of it. However, I realized it's stupid to pave after us when paving the road before the Varden will massively accelerate its rate of travel. I want you to tell me if it gets to be too much, though. We need less sleep, but we do need it and I'm pretty sure this is going to be demanding."
"We're to pave the road at night, then, and the Varden will simply travel as far as we get each day?" Virien clarified.
"That's my proposal," Harry agreed. "If Arya can pitch in, both of us know transfiguration, but I know she's busy. I doubt we can pave faster than the Varden can walk, but as long as we make it further than the Varden could go through open terrain, they'll still gain speed over the Empire."
Niduen flatly thought it was an impossible task for one person capable of transfiguration, but Harry seemed confident, so they hauled out supplies and lit pavilion canopy tent, along with the maps Harry, Filvendor, and Orrin had marked up with the proposed routes.
Illentha took the first open job immediately. She was to fly a broomstick over the terrain during the night, carrying a map which had a passive mapping charm on it that would draw information from the areas she passed over and had line of sight to. They needed the topographical information to plot finer detail. Her map was linked to the one in the pavilion that Filvendor was responsible for managing, making adjustments to the route that roughly adhered to the one King Orrin had signed off on. Inath checked over the foliage map and made further adjustments. After the first night, they were expected to have some of the route plotted in advance, and would instead mark out the route on the landscape.
The rest of them were on construction duty. Harry brought a rack of filled energy gems to the pavilion, their power budget for the night. "This will begin depleting my stockpile, but assuming we get a week or two for them to replenish, I'm not too concerned," he said. Niduen and the rest of the elves used them to rip up terrain and foliage, level the topsoil, and then dig a trench about four meters deep and twelve meters wide, the bed of the road.
Niduen felt a pang of jealousy at Illentha's broomstick. It was faster and truer to the experience of flight than the carpets the rest of them used. They glided along just over the canopy, uprooting trees and flushing out dens of wildlife, forcing life away from its home without the sanctity of respect they were all accustomed to. It felt like a heinous crime to go from living in near-perfect harmony with the wild in Ellesmera to deliberately uprooting vast swaths of it in Surda. Flushing a den of sleeping rabbits out in their sleep and ripping up trees felt profane. Nevertheless, with virtually unlimited energy available in the form of the power gems, they could wreak havoc on the local ecosystem at unfathomable speeds.
Catchment silos floated along next to them, anchored by magic to their carpets. All the biomass they uprooted was directed into them to be composted into more soil. Harry didn't claim to have any specific plans for dirt, but it was a finite resource and wasting it was wasteful.
The next step was for Harry and three others to pour and flatten the road base, an aggregate of soil, clay, concrete, and bitumen that poured endlessly from the mouth of a flying tray they dragged along. One elf, Vru, evened the poured base into a gently-sloping triangle, the middle of the base just high enough that once the sealed pavement covered it, rainwater would flow off the sides and into the wilderness Ealyi followed Vru with a charm she had mastered the best of them which massively increased gravity on the base aggregate, affecting the progress of an army of steamrollers by himself and tamping everything down. Val directed the coating of asphalt, and Harry used transfiguration to roll it down, shore up any imperfections left over from the process, and flash dry the pavement.
Everyone wore their headsets to coordinate, and Virien lingered with Filvendor to manage the information. Every time the deforestation team reported encountering an obstructive hill or ditch, or the terrain became unfavorable and needed to be filled or skirted, Virien marked the spot on the map and Filvendor directed Illo to cut or fill the landscape feature at that spot with a much more clay-heavy aggregate that simulated normal soil.
Initially, problems kept cropping up. Vru was often interrupted by boulders that the deforestation team had missed which caused bulges in the pavement that Harry had to smooth over, or deeper warrens that caused the base aggregate to cave in slightly when Ealyi crushed it down. The margins on either side of the highway started wider when entangled root systems and underbrush all came up together under the inexorable force of the deforestation team's magic. They also burned through the night's energy budget faster than anticipated and Harry was forced to retrieve more filled gems to continue working.
But at about one in the morning, they began to hit their stride. Niduen and the rest of the deforestation team grew more comfortable with the cutting charm and used it before ripping up the trees to separate the area and pull up only what they needed to. They got better at identifying and catching obstructions within the excavated road bed, and Illo mastered more precise fills and cuts that kept everything leveled out. Harry reported needing less tuning for the finished product, and by the time the sun began to rise, Filvendor triumphantly announced seven miles of fresh asphalt laid from about a hundred yards from the Varden to the general direction of the Burning Plains.
Niduen crawled into her tent an hour after sunrise and fell asleep exhausted.
Urd woke anxious. He hailed from Aroughs. When he was a young man full of righteous indignation and with no prospects back home, he'd made the trek down to Surda. He managed to survive the Great Plains only a few pounds skinnier for his trouble, skirted the border of Uru'baen and walked swiftly through the slums of Dras Leona only as long as it took to resupply, then chartered a sketchy sailboat to take him from Furnost, across Lake Tudosten to Petrovya, where he eventually met a man that gave him directions to a special place in the Beors. He'd seen more of Alagaesia in a few months than anyone he'd known had all their lives. When he reached the Varden, he fancied he'd become worldly and maybe a bit wiser. He had a cause to fight for, food to eat, and friends to spar with.
The Battle of Farthen Dur had been something of a reality check to Urd. Sparring was noisy and chaotic, and it often resulted in sore limbs and purple bruises. It was nothing compared to pitched battle.
Endless hordes of massive, grey-skinned and crimson-eyed demons poured from the dark, labyrinthian tunnels beneath the mountain. Unfamiliar contraptions above made great noises, screaming, blood, sweat, and human waste clogged the air, and panic seized at Urd's mind, narrowing his entire world to about four feet around him. Nothing existed beyond the point of his sword. That tiny little world was a terrible hell that did not end for hours.
He had survived that and was rewarded with endless feasting, a scenic route back to Surda, and some measure of peace for the better part of a year.
Urd was no coward. He'd stood his ground and held the line in battle, even as his brothers in arms were crushed in by monsters that stood half-again as tall and twice as broad as him with those terrible, crimson eyes. Yet something had coiled in his gut since the start of the melt, a serpent that bound his insides together with anxiety and anticipation. He would be leaving the safety of Aberon today.
A hundred thousand men was an unfathomably large quantity. The Varden's camp was huge, and according to Harry the Empire had five of those, ready to fight them. Urd could not help but be worried. Leaving the comfort of the camp was not attractive to him. The camp on the move was far less comfortable than the semi-permanent city the Varden had built to dig in for winter. At least they had a second dragon to fight for them.
Reluctantly, Urd cleaned out his tent. He'd have to leave some things behind, his pack was only so big and he could only haul so much on his two legs. He rolled up his bedroll and strapped it to his pack, revealing the tamped bed of leaves and soil he'd carefully flattened late autumn last year that felt closer to the bed he'd had in Farthen Dur than mere loose dirt and grass. He packed his spare change of clothes, his heavy mail shirt, and his little whetstone and oil. His enchanted sword went into the scabbard on his hip and his leather armor, he put on over his travel clothes. Last to go into his pack was a little oil lamp he'd bought from the markets in Aberon with the wages Lady Nasuada provided everyone. He knew some guys who'd wasted their pay on drinks and dice, but Urd thought himself a bit wiser than those guys, and knew the value of money a bit better than them. Nightmares of red-eyed Urgals reminded him that his life outside Aberon was temporary, and he bought only what he could carry.
He tugged the firmly-set spikes of his tent out of the ground they'd been in for months and folded up his tent. His entire home went into his pack. The weight of it was already heavy, and Urd hadn't even started walking through the rolling hills and slushy, dirty ground.
Urd mustered under his captain, one among many sorry, tired, burdened men who wanted dearly to make a life in Surda instead of trudging through harsh terrain for weeks at a time, ever closer to the prize of uncertain death and conflict. The dream of a free Alagaesia never felt further to Urd than when he eyed the hill the army marched towards.
Shouts of amazement filtered from past the crest.
"It's a road!" filtered back, men laughing in relief. "Look!"
Urd crested the hill. A strip of flat, black, paved, blessed road ran straight from the base of the hill onward.
Thank you, Harry, he thought. Maybe the march won't be so bad.
"What's the verdict?" Harry watched Nasuada keenly as she ate.
"This is provided to everyone?" she asked. It wasn't any true delicacy, the cheeseburger Harry insisted she eat with her bare hands, but it was far better than Nasuada ever expected camp food to be.
"Not for people with dietary restrictions," he amended. "But everyone who wants one, yeah. The cooks seem happier, too. Prepping food over open flames has to be harder than stovetops and grills."
Nasuada had recently ascended in social strata past the point where being seen in the kitchens was acceptable, but before her father's death, Nasuada had had more freedom to explore. She knew the dwarves had similar grills, steel grates over an open flame and iron stovetops with hatches for wood fires, but none had the ease of use that magic lended. She was constantly astonished by what Harry produced. She'd expected to be slowed by Harry's road project, stalling the Varden to the pace they could manage to finish in the wake of the cleared landscape behind the army's march.
Instead, he had paved before them, meaning it took a fraction of the time to travel to the end. The first day, Nasuada had expected to make it five miles, if she were generous. She expected the Varden to be slow, reluctant to leave the semi-permanent winter camp and bogged down by the freeriders from Surda who wanted to join the campaign but had not been folded into either the Varden's command structure or the Surdan standing army.
They made it seven miles in two hours.
Before even lunchtime, the Varden was encamped neatly on the side of the road that had not existed the previous day. There was a new queue for the showers. Jormundur had to step in and figure out some sort of schedule to organize the men, then Nasuada had to issue an edict mandating that everyone visit the showers once a day. Immediately, the camp was the cleanest Nasuada had ever seen, even when it was a long-term encampment with proper latrines. It didn't smell offensive at all, and the Varden had the rest of the day to train instead of marching.
If things continued like they had today, Nasuada was confident they could overcome the massive numbers the Empire fielded.
Harry had never been busier. Not even the final weeks of Umbridge's reign when every teacher was busy cramming every bit of homework and revision into his skull for OWL's did Harry have as much to do every day. From the moment he woke to the instant he collapsed asleep, Harry was busy. He averaged two hours of sleep, an amount even elves judged unhealthy.
Every morning he woke up and spent an hour in the infirmary tent addressing the worst cases with Angela. After that, he had until late afternoon 'to himself,' but that time was inevitably filled with tasks that took him away from camp, or else training with the Sniper Corps. Late afternoon, he helped set up the stage for entertainment and Fireside Chats. Per Trianna's advice, he delegated everything he possibly could, but the trouble was that Du Vrangr Gata and the Sniper Corps simply didn't number high enough to fill every task. Nasuada quickly cottoned onto what he was trying to accomplish with the assemblies and wound up taking over the scheduling for who was performing on which nights, and gave him quick briefings on the relevant information he could give the wider Varden which was either not very damaging for Galbatorix's spies to find, or else probably already known to them, anyways.
Between the end of the Fireside Chats and sunset, Harry did projects and lessons with the magicians. After the showers were the kitchens. Currently, they were working on a portable hospital, and expected the project to take at least a week to complete to their standards.
Once it was night time, road building took the lion's share of Harry's time. The team improved vastly for the first week, but they maxed out at about fifteen miles of road in a night, which pushed everyone to their limits and strained the output of the huge forest that fed Harry's power gems. Everyone managed to streamline their tasks and maximize the efficiency of their magic initially for the first burst of improvement, after which diminishing returns dwindled the additional speed they could reach. Most improvements came from needing to burn less energy for the same task as the Sniper Corps mastered more wandless spells instead of using Alagaesian magic for their tasks. Illentha only flew mapping runs every third night and contributed to the building, and Virien was able to replace Filvendor's plotting route by himself, freeing Filvendor to also contribute directly to construction.
Arya, thankfully, was available to take over for Harry enough that when smaller bridges had to be made for gorges, small rivers, and streams, Harry could delegate the asphalt paving and transfiguration touch ups to her and Firnen and spice up the routine with Filvendor and some civil engineering.
Most of Harry's 'free time' during the morning and afternoon was consumed by the other demands of roadwork; material acquisition. The base aggregate and asphalt both consumed enormous quantities of material, and the clay, bitumen, sand, and gravel all had to come from somewhere. Harry flew and apparated up and down the east coast, enchanting and filling enormous expanded silos with material. He pumped crude oil out of an undersea reservoir into a huge refinery under time acceleration to render it down. All the petroleum products besides bitumen were accumulating in increasingly ludicrous stockpiles, and the bitumen Harry burned through on asphalt as fast as he could produce it.
Harry spent hours alchemically processing the base aggregate and asphalt so the road would last for eternity without potholes or cracks, spent hours enchanting materials for bridges, spent hours dashing between beaches for seams of clay and piles of sand and valleys for gravel and sediment. All through the midday, all of Harry's time went to acquiring material in enormous batches, supporting the night of road-building that would zero out his stockpiles and force him to repeat the process the next day.
It left no time for anything else. Harry couldn't spend time with Elva or Arya or Firnen. He only even saw Arya when they were both working on the road at night, and they rarely saw each other face to face, instead talking over the headsets on a private channel. Harry consumed an unhealthy amount of alchemical nutrient powder just to keep himself going. He constantly drew on energy gems to keep up.
It felt like Harry spent all day putting out fires, and all night setting new ones to deal with tomorrow. He felt like he couldn't stop or slow down, and every time he thought about taking a break, Luna and Ollivander in the Malfoy manor basement came unbidden to his mind. Roran didn't mean much to him, personally, but he was Eragon's family.
But if there was one good thing about it, it was that the Varden was cruising. Every day they cleared miles of ground. They made it to the deep southern inlet and the city of Fjordskip in merely two weeks. The bathhouses saw marked decrease in sickness and infections according to Angela, morale was at an all-time high according to Jormundur, and relations between the Urgals and humans were improving. Everyone liked having loads of really good food every lunch and dinner, everyone liked knowing how the march was progressing during chats, and everyone's morale was boosted by the recovery of those who had been crippled or seriously injured either on the previous march from Farthen Dur or during the wintertime. The mobile hospital was becoming legendary to the men for its ability to heal injuries no one expected to recover from, and Firnen's decision to shadow the 'less offensively odorous' Varden did wonders for their morale.
After two weeks spent frantically busy juggling all the demands on his time, Harry was forced to delegate the night's Fireside Chat to Jormundur and take dinner with Nasuada, Orrin, and the rest of the 'important folk.' He managed to wrangle a couple guest concessions out of them and got Elva and Angela seats at the command pavilion for the feast. Firnen laid behind the table on the tamped grass, a massive, glittering green shadow.
He was too tired to make pretense of caring either way about the intricate and pointless set of manners nobility expected everyone to adhere to and collapsed into his seat across from King Orrin straight away.
"Are you feeling alright?" Angela asked. Elva stared silently at him from next to her, her hands folded over each other. One tiny set of fingers messed with the blue bracelet on her arm.
"I'm knackered," Harry admitted. "I've never been this busy in my life."
"I apologize, but I'm not quite fluent in the Ancient Language," King Orrin said. Harry heard that he was trying not to be offensive and cut him some slack.
"I said I'm really tired," he repeated in Common. "I've never been so busy in my life."
Nasuada shot him a look of concern. "Will you be prepared for battle?"
"I'd not like my chances against Galbatorix at this very instant, but I'm sure we'll get to the Burning Plains with time to recover." He'd better. Merlin knew Harry was not putting in the absolute capacity of his effort to expediting the Varden's march just to meet Galbatorix's army with no advantages to show for. The Empire did have its own road system, but it was more dirt and gravel than pavement, and they still had much more distance to cover and a much larger, unwieldy army to wrangle. A flash of white drew a chorus of awe from the Varden's Council of Elders.
Eppie had flashed in next to Elva and snuck a strip of bacon off her plate. "I recall a larger bird of the same species delivering your mail," King Orrin remarked. "My congratulations on her clutch."
Harry nodded absently. "I wonder what Hedwig gets up to without any supervision these days. I only see her in my bedroom." A pallor seemed to come over everyone who knew of the phoenix. "Maybe I should find out."
Silence stretched for a few moments. Then food arrived and the moment was gone. "This is an unfamiliar dish," King Orrin said, examining the triangular slice of bread, cheese, tomato, and pepperoni. He reached for his silverware. Harry mindlessly grabbed his slice by the crust and bit in.
"Oh. I had not expected the proper way to eat it was without utensils," he laughed. "Convenient!"
"I've heard glowing endorsements of the new mobile hospital," Nasuada prompted Harry. "Can you speak on that?"
Harry finished chewing. "Yeah. I was thinking about how important our triage and healthcare is. Not only does excellent healing allow us to recover more casualties and keep our numbers up, it helps the soldiers trust that they'll not be left cripples at the end of the campaign, and hopefully will be braver for the knowledge that we can fix almost anything short of death."
"Anything?" Orrin asked. "There are many injuries considered incurable even with magic. You can heal all ailments?"
"Everything below the neck," Harry agreed. Between his work on limb replacements, bio-alchemy, and his work making the Well of Rebirth, Harry had learned how to grow entire human bodies out of DNA samples. Transfering souls between bodies remained an issue, but head transplants neatly side-stepped the problem. "The plan is to equip field medics with a potion called the Draught of Living Death."
"You used that on the Urgals under Durza's thrall, did you not?" Nasuada said.
"What does it do?" Orrin sipped his wine.
"I think Angela could better answer you. I've never been the most devoted student of potions."
"How thoughtful," Angela grinned. "It's a draught which arrests every natural function in the body, plus a few features of convenience. It stops all the internal organs and their processes–the lungs and heart, eyes, brain, intestines, and so on, and it halts cellular respiration and the production of proteins. It also instantly coagulates the body's internal fluids, essentially petrifying the drinker in such a way that it can be restored to its previous health without much trouble, while maintaining the technical physical state of being 'alive,' so the soul does not flee and result in true death. It's the ultimate triage drug because it can preserve someone's life no matter the damage they received, so long as it's given before they die. It buys the drinker time for a healer to fix them up without the risk of expiring before they can be healed."
"Do you claim you can heal any fallen soldiers not dead by the time they are given this- draught?" Sabrae clarified.
"Anything below the neck," Harry repeated. "If the brain is ruined, I haven't any idea how to fix it and since that's where your soul is anchored to your body, it's the only irreplaceable part of you. I should also add, a body transplant isn't something you can get some average healer to do. This will take the personal attention of a powerful magician with a very specific skillset, and I don't anticipate there being anyone besides me with the capabilities. Casualties like that will probably still end up out of the war unless they're important enough to warrant several full days of my time. Mostly, this will mean that at the end, they can be brought back."
Nasuada went silent. Harry wondered what was going through her head. Probably a list of people she considered important enough to warrant that kind of treatment.
"Is it possible another Well be constructed to do something similar?" Arya asked mentally, sending him a pointed look across the table.
"It took close to a year to get the first one done," Harry sent back. "But I thought of something similar. An artifact that would draw strength from the wielder to execute a long series of spells amounting to comprehensive treatment by a healer."
"Wouldn't that take a similarly long time to make?"
"Maybe not. If I made batches of them and linked them with the protean charm, I think I could push 'updates' across all of them and just gradually implement more features as I find the time."
"-Harry?"
"Sorry, what was that?" Harry withdrew himself and perked up.
"Would you consider riding with my party tomorrow? I would enjoy hearing more about the advancements you've made in medicine and natural philosophy." Orrin repeated.
Incredulity flooded Harry. "No!" he exclaimed. Orrin's face fell. "Sorry, King Orrin, it's just that the time the Varden spends actually walking down the road is barely enough for me to gather the resources needed for the next segment of road. And that's not the only thing I have to get done every day. I would love to spend a day talking science with you, but I won't have a second of free time until we get to the Burning Plains."
Harry regretted having to shoot Orrin down. Once he got over himself and recognized that Harry didn't much care that he was a King, he was actually fun to be around. He was curious like Arthur Weasley, except he had enough of a foundation that discussing physics and chemistry with him wasn't hopeless. "When we reach the Burning Plains." Harry promised.
"I do not mean to impose," Orrin backed. "I can hardly believe it when we start out every day on a fresh stretch of immaculate, smooth road that was not there the day before. I have some understanding of road-building, and my treasurer has said enough to make me dread hearing that Surda's needs repairs."
Harry felt that. Road construction projects were often measured not in hundreds of thousands but millions of pounds and in the case of larger infrastructure, billions.
"Are you married?" Ellesari asked suddenly. She nodded to Arya and Harry. "You speak to each other as if…intimate."
Harry and Arya exchanged looks. Though neither brushed the other's mind, the thought clearly was shared between them: is she for real?
"We are not," Arya denied. Technically, that was true. Harry wasn't sure if he should be offended or not.
"Perhaps your tasks might be made easier and your relationships to the Varden…tighter if you considered taking a-" Ellesari paused, and Harry preemptively winced. The lady psyched herself up to deliver a suggestion she knew would be taken awfully. "Human bride."
Harry stood up and left fuming.
"I did not think you would be so bothered by Ellesari's gauche comment," Arya murmured. Harry rubbed the covers of the bed with his arm. "It was racist and invasive, but hardly the worst offense you've decided not to care about."
He sighed. Why was he so bothered? "Ellesari was over the line, but I was more bothered by your denying we were married."
Arya was silent for a while.
"We are not."
"No, we're not," Harry agreed.
"Do you want us to be?"
Harry gazed into her green eyes. Arya's hair splayed over the pillow, framing her curious face. "I want to marry you, I don't want to just be married," he said finally. "Maybe it's my human monkey brain expressing its desire to propagate my genetics, but I really love being with you, and the idea that we might just go our separate ways is intimidating in a way I hadn't realized until Ellesari said that."
"I've never wanted that," Arya denied. "I just don't see the value in ritualizing an intimate agreement and publicizing private business to appease human society."
Harry rolled his eyes. "I don't care what everyone else thinks, I guess I just want to remind myself that our relationship is real and not just convenient, fun sex and cohabitation."
"What is marriage to you, then? Commitment?" Arya asked. "I am committed. Elves do not follow the tradition of marriage, but we do understand the value of commitment, especially when there is a child or dependent in the picture. Not only do I care very much about you and don't foresee that changing any time soon, Elva is a responsibility we have taken on together and it would be wrong of us to shirk that because of personal differences."
Harry tried to sort out his feelings. With Ginny, that sort of had been the extent of their relationship. Both of them were physically attracted to each other, they had been through enough together and knew each other well enough to know they'd be reasonably compatible, and decided to try each other out. Circumstances kept getting in the way and never had they been so committed to each other that Harry felt like he was cheating on her with Arya.
Harry closed his eyes and sank into the mattress. He was so tired, the soft, cool depths of the mattress invited him deeper. "I guess I don't want to feel like Elva or any prospective biological child we have is the only thing tying us together. I love you, Arya. I don't want anything to get between us."
Arya snorted. Harry imagined her expression, a cute contortion of dismissal. Her red lips were curled in a wicked smirk, her cheeks risen just high enough to push the bottom of her eyes up a tiny bit. "I love you too, Harry. An idiot like Ellesari doesn't have a chance at getting between us."
"Yeah, fuck her," Harry sighed.
"I don't think there's anyone willing to do that," Arya cracked. "We have time for another round before sunset. Do you want to nap instead?"
Harry cracked open an eyelid. Arya had let the covers fall enough to tempt him with a glimpse of her skin.
But the mattress was really damn soft.
"Are you really into it, or are you trying to assure me with your fabulous body?"
Arya considered. "A bit of both, but I could use a nap, too."
"Let's do that," Harry breathed.
An extra two hours of sleep did wonders for Harry, and Arya decided to join him and the Sniper Corps for the entire night.
"Arya!" Filvendor waved. "May good fortune rule over you." he repeated his greeting to Firnen, who bobbed his head in a nod of acknowledgement.
"Peace live in your heart, Filvendor," Arya smiled. "I am feeling rested, and it would be wrong of me to shirk this task when I can help. Let us see the route we pave tonight. It is a beautiful night tonight."
"Indeed." Filvendor tilted his neck back. "The stars are out with passion tonight."
The band of the galaxy laid out overhead, a glorious conflagration of motes of light. Harry breathed in deeply. It smelled like springtime.
"The ground is soft and wet," Illo commented. "The mud will challenge our ability to pour the base aggregate. I would caution us to stay vigilant. Things obvious in firm ground may be hidden by muck and slush."
"I can stay and be vigilant," Illentha offered. "I have mapped to the other side of the Petrovya river. We will reach Dauth tonight or tomorrow night."
Filvendor smoothed out the map beneath the fluorescent white lights of the pavilion. He traced a red line into the city. Dauth looked like a maze of intersecting streets encircled by a thick stone wall. The topography put it at the top of a fairly-sized cluster of hills, and though it had no true 'suburbs,' the buildings only grew sparser from the wall.
"I thought to pave over the existing roads through this route," Filvendor traced a finger along what was presumably a winding dirt path. "It is only direct in these places, though."
"We've gained a lot of time, can we afford to spend some of it on an overpass?" Harry suggested. "Not over the entire city, but here where the stream feeds the city, we could do a small bridge. Then the road could cross the paths here and here."
"I would caution against steep gradients," Filvendor warned. "Surdans will not appreciate having to drag wagons and handcarts up more than five or ten degrees of slope."
Harry hadn't thought of that. In his mind, the roads were for cars and not people and horses. "I'm just leery of sending a huge amount of traffic through an area right next to someone's house. If this is the main travel artery of Surda, it should be convenient but not so close to anything that it causes noise pollution. In this case I guess horse pollution." Harry reckoned that was probably worse.
"What about intersections here and here? The road could split the difference between the outskirts and inside the walls."
"I like it. Except, could it curve here?" Harry pointed to a spot where Filvendor suggested the road curve north, above Dauth and past the inlet. He traced his finger south, down to the docks Dauth had set into the gulf. "It would be useful to shipping overland, too, and bear the majority of local traffic."
Filvendor drummed his fingers. "The south side is more built up. It'd have to go all the way around the houses and workshops which would take it further from the city walls, or else we'd have to go through extant buildings. And then we'd have to either take another long detour to make it north of the inlet or else construct a colossal bridge."
Harry sucked in a breath. "Is that going to be a problem? Moving people out of the way? The U.K. had 'compulsory purchase,' which was when the government could evict people from their land–with generous compensation–when they wanted to construct some public project that required the occupied land. I think it's called 'eminent domain' in America."
"Humans tend to be very protective of their land, more so the longer it's been in their family," Arya said. "If King Orrin agrees, he can force them out, but land ownership is one of the things humans hold nearly sacred."
It didn't necessarily stop the route in its tracks; tunnels and bridges remained an option, but Harry did not like hearing that some moldy log shack was in the way of glorious Surdan infrastructure.
"We have time to burn on this, don't we?" Harry assumed they could just camp out for an extra couple days while King Orrin negotiated with what looked like fourteen family houses that obstructed the margins of the road.
"Sure, but is this what we want to spend that time on?" Arya said. "Think about what advantages arriving first can get us. This is something we can come back to after the war, or even after the first major battle, just us and maybe King Orrin."
They had bought a lot of time. Harry thought it would be on the order of a month or so, and he couldn't imagine negotiations taking more than a week at most. It wasn't like he wanted to just obliterate the houses and leave them homeless, he'd move the buildings to a different parcel of land and everyone would go on their merry way.
"The bridge will take time, too," Filvendor reminded.
Ideas coalesced in Harry's mind. "It's likely going to take at least a week to bridge the gulf in any case. We could do them at the same time. It would provide the most direct land route to Aroughs, which will presumably be a friendly city in the near future."
"Dauth and Aroughs are connected by water, anyways. It is always easier to ship. I can think only of travelers," Arya said. "How much faster will it be to bridge the river before the gulf?"
Filvendor tapped the outlet. "The river widens at the neck of the inlet, but if we route south around Daret, it is a fair distance out of the way. There is a river crossing that could accommodate us here," he indicated a fortified bridge well out of the way to the north, "but it will take a few days to reach, and span several miles."
The river would be shallower, but that was less of a concern than distance spanned. The bay was wide–almost fifteen miles and completely beyond consideration for mundane technology without the aid of magic. Now wasn't the time for vanity superprojects, but the time it would take to skirt north of Daret and construct a smaller bridge over the Petrovya would be only a few days shorter. Negotiations for compulsory purchase would buy Harry some time to rest, too.
"I cast my vote for the south road and long bridge. I think it'll take longer, yes, but not by so much, and this is going to be permanent infrastructure. It's worth doing right when the cost is marginal." He put in.
"I vote against," Arya said. "This issue can be tabled until after the Varden reaches the Burning Plains. We march over rougher terrain and use the existing bridge, then return to negotiate properly."
Harry was outvoted in the end, Filvendor the last to apologetically vote against. "We'll have time to draw up the plans for something truly beautiful," he said.
Later, Harry was eating ice cream in the new mess pavilions when a spike of general alarm rendered on the south-east section of camp. He and Arya glanced at each other. "Was that-?"
"I don't know," she said.
They abandoned their dishes and headed towards the commotion. Shouting grew louder, drifting back from a column of dark smoke. Harry saw a tiny ball flung into the air by the smoke. A moment later, a subtle gust of hot air washed over them and with a low pop, the smoke column dissipated.
Harry brought his headset out from soulspace. "-fire set by a man who protests his innocence," Illo was saying. "They caught him with brandy and flint, just standing by the edge of the fire. Someone had to pull him back from jumping in."
"Arya and I are a minute out." They started running, bounding between tents with strides measured in several yards. "What got destroyed?"
"Horses, mostly," Illo said. "The Varden's livestock for burden. Personal horses are kept all over camp, so the cavalry is less neutered than it could have been. Virien caught the fire early. I'd estimate a third are dead or too injured to pull carts."
The stench of burning flesh and dung grew pungent. They zeroed in on Illo and dashed over. A swath of tents, feed troughs, grooming kits and wagons of horse tack had gone up and was blackened but not smoldering. The air still felt warm. He stood with Carn and Virien next to a man whose hands were bound with rope next to a singed tent.
"I don't know why I did it, I swear!" he protested. "My body just stopped listening to me. I'm loyal to the Varden, the Empire killed my sisters. Please, I have no reason to do this!"
Harry touched the man's mind. Panic, confusion, nervousness.
"Did you examine his mind?" Harry sent to Illo.
"Cursorily. An accomplished magician could have hidden from my search, but I found indication of external control. Concerningly, an enemy magician has already attempted to kill him with magic."
"Harry!" the man caught sight of him. "I didn't do it, I swear."
"I believe you," Harry assured him. "Mostly I assume you're still bound so whoever controlled you can't make you kill yourself to hide their tracks."
The man paled. "They could do that?" he whispered.
"With difficulty," Harry nodded. He stepped forward. "We'll only keep you bound until we know what you do, then they'll have no reason to risk-"
Something cracked by inches from his ear. Harry flinched violently. Arya, Virien, and Illo had all ducked to the ground. Harry felt something warm and chunky splatter over his face. He heard shouts and a scream. Matter had caught in his eyelashes.
"Protego!"
"Scourgify," Arya choked. It felt like someone had scrubbed his face with steel wool. The stuff all over his head and neck vanished. A roar echoed over the camp.
Another crack whizzed by. "Show me where that came from," Harry demanded, dumping power into the words. An image of a hidden silhouette standing in the narrow patch of mud between two tents projected onto the air. The figure held a metal tube pointed away from him.
"Is that-"
"Zoom out. Aerial view." Harry spotted a landmark and sprinted towards it, leaping over two tents at a time. Arya flew behind him. A pinprick of absolute terror came from closer to the middle of camp. Before Harry's eyes in the scrying window, the man's wards ended and his revealed head dissolved, green fire pouring out his eyes and ears.
"I count fifteen active magic users," Illentha's voice said. "Two pairs by the fire, seven by Du Vrangr Gata's wagon, two next to Nasuada and Orrin, one alone, and two unaccounted for. An unknown short man with a thick beard wearing hides and a middle-aged woman with blonde-grey hair. The man's eyes are closed in focus. Do I shoot him?"
Harry found her mind hundreds of feet up and a thousand feet out on her disillusioned flying carpet. "Shit. If you have orange tips, yes."
"I'm on green tips."
"Where is he?"
"Look through my eyes."
Harry entered Illentha's opened mind. One eye peered through her scope. He was sitting between four tents pitched together, obscured except from above. Already, her hands were feeling for the box of rubber flashbang rounds and releasing the magazine catch. Harry heard a faint gunshot through Illentha's ears. In his own ears, it was much louder. He was jarred out of her mind.
"That was in the direction of the command tent," Arya said. "Take the shot."
Illentha dropped the orange mag and immediately aimed the bullet in the chamber over the man's heart. Harry felt the cold trigger beneath her finger. The man in the scope flinched, then sagged. "He survived. His wards saved him." Already, she had picked the orange mag back up and slotted it in. Three seconds later, a loud bang and a blinding flash let Harry pinpoint the enemy magician. He could only hope the man was too dazed to commit suicide. He was mere feet away, already mentally bearing down on his defenses. They caved with little resistance, information and memories flooding into Harry's mind.
Anders strode down the alley between the practice field and the armory. The trick was to be completely and utterly assured of his belonging. He gave a nod to a random man whose mind was bare to him. Carrick, a son of a shipwright, father of two, a passionate carpenter, and a traitor.
He was one of the first of the Black Hand to integrate himself into the Varden. He had arrived in the depth of winter and sold a sad story to a group of Surdans, farmers all who had been stirred to action by Little King Orrin. Jarna was a leader among the group, a short, stocky, and gap-toothed man with a brown beard and the sort of integrity that others couldn't help but gather around. He asked too many questions. Once Anders managed a spot in the Varden's muster piggybacking off Jarna and his friends' enlistment, Anders found it easy enough to arrange an accident for him. He had been taught to break minds and cast spells at the knee of one who had learned his craft at the knee of Galbatorix himself, and it was no trouble to enter his mind and force him to trip next to a bared weapon rack during training.
Anders had many tasks. He was not given direct orders in the same way a common footsoldier was, rather he had many little tasks he was to do if the opportunity presented itself, and one big one to work towards.
Living with the Varden was a banal existence. His weakness with traditional arms was revealed in training, one of the few things to do in camp that wasn't designed to siphon his gold from him, and he was careful to never show too much of his skill with…nontraditional arms. He woke and ate from a pavilion he was to investigate and infiltrate if possible, but it proved too well guarded and its operators were subject to mental scrutiny. He trained with and bemoaned his lack of skill wielding a spear, except when he could slip away and gather intelligence to send on, ate lunch, then spent his free time productively.
As one of the first of the Black Hand in, Anders often helped his colleagues in after him. Despite the frustrating prevalence of mental defenses in recruiters and officers, there was always something he could do with his mind or magic to nudge the right outcome. But his safety came first, for he had a rare thing with him.
When the winter drew to its end, the consensus among them and the orders from the top were not to risk their positions with aimless sabotage and to wait until the Varden was so engaged with the Empire that they had little left to deal with whatever crippling blows they dealt. The first attack held the greatest advantage, for the Varden was merrily oblivious to their existence. Why squander that first great strike on a lesser goal with lesser opportunity?
Except the Varden traveled far too fast. How the cursed wizard was able to produce roads, perhaps the most costly infrastructure of all, at a pace that oustripped the Empire's army, was unfathomable. The Black Hand was not to ever attack him, the orders were. He had nearly slain Galbatorix incidentally while fleeing with casualties in tow. Anders knew himself strong in magic, but his was a candle to Galbatorix's sun, and an annoyance to the sun was an insurmountable obstacle to him.
They were not to even get close to him or his servants, the twelve new magicians he pretended to have produced from the ether. They could not sabotage the road (for who could?) but they could sabotage the Varden, and in order to buy time for the Empire to catch up, whatever they did must be big.
Anders quelled his nerves and slid into the position he'd picked for himself. Camp was arranged the same every time, and he knew they'd be there that afternoon. They were pitched even closer together than normal, an unexpected boon. At the center was just enough room for a man to stand upright. His mind was tightly guarded and he could not contact his colleagues, (indeed he did not know most of them, such was compartmentalization and even he who helped insert agents did not know them all), but he was assured that his first task was a loud one, and his signal a big one.
He laid prone against the muddy grass, drawing from his thick shirt a metal tube device. Ahead of him lay a tall canvas wall. The command pavilion. Around it tall armored guards watched, ceaselessly vigilant for any sign of a person like him, black hawk head symbols painted on their gear. Cowled in afternoon shadow as he was, Anders thought himself safe. His mind was tentatively open, yet his task and his nerves Anders kept in the back of his mind. He filled himself with complaints. He was poor with the spear, the drill instructor was irritating, and he did not like having to shower every day.
The featherlight touch of the wizard's searching mind passed right over him, his complaints effective camouflage. Anders let some nerves in. Total tranquility was a sort of deviation from the normal, too. There was an art to it.
Burly Urgal circled to the left, replaced by Burly Dwarf, whose body covered even less of the tent.
With infinite caution and the maximum subtlety Anders possessed, he extended his mind outwards. Like a blind man on the lip of a volcano, he inched agonizingly towards the tent, fearful of the slightest touch against the Nighthawks' minds. In darkness his mind extended, further and further until Anders mistakenly brushed against a guarded mind.
Burly Dwarf's head snapped up warily. He gazed out towards the camp, beckoning Burly Urgal to bend down and murmuring something. Burly Urgal's yellow eyes passed up and down the aisle of tents, searching between tents and even in shadows. Anders's body trembled with nervous energy, the tube of his weapon warm under his palms, but his mind remained steadfast in complaining about his shoddy spearwork.
Urgal looked right between the tents of Anders's hiding spot, squinting. To Anders it was hours before Burly Urgal finally decided he was satisfied and moved on. A minute later, he murmured something to the dwarf and shrugged, resuming his sentinel stance.
Anders continued to map the outside of the tent with his mind until he had isolated the location of all six of Nasuada's guards and Orrin's four. Then, he got up to his knees and waited for the signal.
Four minutes later, it came with a cacophony of screaming, burning livestock and a plume of black smoke. Anders watched from his hiding place with keen eyes.
Orders have changed. You are to eliminate the pawn near the livestock pens. When you are done, continue as you were.
Anders shivered and shifted his attention beneath the smoke. He tracked the man they took as he was bound and questioned by two of Du Vrangr Gata. Still complaining internally of spearwork, Anders lined up the device with the man's head just as the wizard arrived. He pulled the lever.
The tube bucked against his shoulder, the muzzle emitting a plume of powder and a crack that echoed against the sky. Anders saw his target's head explode, and thought his spearwork could use some practice. Another shot of opportunity at the wizard stopped at his wards. His attention was drawn. It took great effort to keep his mind moderately level and quash the panic that began to mount. Quickly now, he stuffed more powder and rammed another ball into the gun and turned back to the wall of the tent, extending his mind just enough to confirm that the mind he came across was female.
The shot tore through the tent and elicited a brief female shout moments before something impacted him with all the force of a siege engine, draining his wards to nothing and staggering him. Before Anders could do much more than gasp, his world exploded into spots on his retinas and ringing in his ears.
Anders did not know what was going on. Was that-? No! Anders groped at the mental intruder. The tents around him swam in triplicate. "Die self," he gasped, and knew no more.
"I lost the other," Illentha reported over Harry's headset. "No one near where I last saw her resembles her."
"It's fine," Harry responded. He gazed down on the crumpled form of Anders, who he'd known for no more than ten seconds before he'd committed suicide. The tents had been cleared away and Trianna, Nasuada, and Imladris stood around his body. Nasuada's Nighthawks kept the curious masses away. Imladris, her bodyguard, had been killed. Firnen prowled around their group, setting most of the humans on edge.
"What happened?" Nasuada demanded. "It sounded like the same weapon as last time."
Harry levitated a twisted pipe of charred metal. He sniffed it. A very faint scent of sulfur came through under the overpowering smell of iron.
"Someone lit a fire near the Varden's livestock," he said. "They compelled a common footsoldier through his mind, then attempted twice to kill him, once unsuccessfully with magic, then again with this," he gestured at the ruined weapon. "Illentha, Arya and I got to Anders here hiding here with this, but he destroyed it and killed himself before we could stop him. He had another accomplice who was lost in the action."
The Nighthawks closed ranks at the news that there were others out there.
"Did you learn anything from him? What is that weapon?" Nasuada's voice was forcibly level. She just hid it as well as he used to. Harry supposed now that both sides were using guns, there wasn't much point in hiding that he had them, too. He reminded himself that Imladris's death was not his fault. Galbatorix had first used a firearm before his rifles were within a thousand miles of Alagaesia.
"I learned a fair bit," he told her. "And I have a good idea of what this was," he tapped the pipe with his wand. "Reparo."
A crude flintlock pistol assembled itself out of the twisted, burnt hunk, less gun and more hand cannon. Harry patted Anders's waist down and tugged two pouches from his belt. Beneath Nasuada's watchful eyes, he poured a bit of coarse gunpowder and a few little steel balls onto his palm. "Let's take this somewhere more secure."
"The kitchens have been attacked," Virien reported over the headsets, a minute later as they entered. "Another pawn. A kitchen worker stabbed two of her colleagues and Trianna was forced to defend the food storage. One is probably going to live, the other died. Culprit at large."
Harry cursed. "Damn. Can you guys handle everything? Nasuada's with me and wants answers."
"Yes," Virien reported. "The rest of us are flying up to get control of the situation."
"What happened?" Nasuada asked, trying to keep her jaw up looking around the inside of the nexus within Harry's tent. Her guards showed no such restraint, and openly gawked.
"Someone attacked the mess tents," Harry relayed. "Mind control. They killed one cook and injured another in an attempt at the food stores. Can we get King Orrin in here? I don't want to have to go over everything twice."
One of Nasuada's guards left with the message and five minutes later, King Orrin and his guards filtered in and stopped to gawk. "By the gods, your magic can do this?" he marveled.
"Let us focus on the matter at hand," Arya said. Orrin apologized and composed himself.
For the next ten minutes, Harry split his attention between describing the basic workings of a primitive firearm and piecing together the reports that filtered over the headsets in the aftermath. One more attempt was made and arguably had the worst outcome; another member of Du Vrangr Gata was killed in defense of the potion stores in the med tent. The enemy magician had been killed immediately after, but was male and thus unlikely to be the one Illentha lost track of. The Draught of Living Death wasn't yet part of the Varden medics' training, and several men had perished from injuries that could have been healed.
King Orrin took very little information to understand exactly what a firearm was and how it worked, though Nasuada needed a bit more groundwork. Explosions weren't a common concept during Alagaesia's time period, mostly the ken of magicians and rare unfortunate millers who let their flour catch fire.
"Brilliant," he said, sniffing the powder pouch. "I could smell the sulfur, but saltpeter as oxygenation is an unexpected stroke of genius. And you say where you're from, these 'guns' are common?"
"I can't think of a single infantry force that uses any melee weapon," Harry told him. Most probably had combat knives and some weird, specialized forces might have a modern take on the sword, but they were almost certainly backups. "I made some guns of a specific class that are miles better than this, but they have their own weaknesses. Guns back home came in all shapes and sizes.
"But your cavalry do use melee?" Orrin asked. The absurdity of the idea made Harry laugh.
"They don't use horses."
He didn't see it when Orrin was being king of Surda, but when science came up, it was clear to Harry that Orrin was sharp. Not just the kind of sharp where he'd read a lot of books and understood all the concepts the author described, but sharp like someone who made new connections from two different books that no one had heard of before.
"You have more experience with these guns," Nasuada said. "Tell me what impact you predict they'll have on the battlefield."
Harry didn't think Galbatorix could afford to arm the common footsoldier with flintlocks. The Empire still made steel in bloomeries, and every one of them had to be shaped by hand by a practiced blacksmith. The quantity of steel Harry was churning out every day in anticipation of bridges would take the Empire thousands of people and months at a time.
"I don't think we'll see them outside of spies and assassins," he predicted. "These aren't accurate past a hundred feet or so, so bows are more accurate at range. Discounting the fact that both a bullet and an arrow can be guided by magic, these will be expensive and difficult for the Empire to produce and don't offer significant advantages over the bow and arrow. They're easier to conceal than a sword and easier to kill with than a knife, which makes them perfect for enemies who need stealth."
"But yours are better." Nasuada said shrewdly. "How much better can Galbatorix's get?"
Automatic weapons were less of a step and more of a mountainous ascent up from muzzle loaders. Galbatorix was also working from a lower technology base than Harry, and did so without convenient access to transfiguration. Harry had a rough understanding of how advanced the Riders' science was from Oromis's lessons. Advanced enough that Galbatorix could work out pointy bullets that could pose a threat to unwarded, armored soldiers.
The apathetic calculation hanging over Harry was that it wasn't worth wasting a bullet on a footsoldier. "It's something for important people to worry about, but the economy of scale isn't there for Galbatorix, and won't be until he industrializes, which takes time. Making a long, straight, circular tube with hammers is hard, and casting the metal makes it prone to blowing up in the user's face."
He briefly explained the concept of cannons as a general thing to be concerned about, but that wasn't as relevant as if they were the defenders. The only fortifications they had to worry about were Surdan cities. "The gist of cannons is that once they became popular, people stopped building walls. They launch big metal balls fast enough to break castle walls, and are easier to move and operate than trebuchets. I'll be honest, they might have been a boon to us, but I know plenty of curses that will crack city walls like an egg, and the twelve magicians I brought have similar tools. If they're present in the upcoming battle, we can consider using some, but if he doesn't have them, I'd rather not give him the idea."
Later, when everyone was able to compile a full damage report, it became clear that they didn't have five or six enemy magicians among them, they had dozens. Though most regions of camp had been sabotaged in one way or another, the damages trended towards crippling the Varden's mobility, which made sense; they were moving so quickly the Empire badly needed time to catch up. The question was no longer how early the Varden would make it to the Burning Plains, but if they had time to conquer Aroughs before the Empire even got close.
Many fires had cropped up on wagons and carts and beasts of burden had been poisoned or killed. The poisoning had come later, too, concealing the true scope of the attack until they'd lost nearly half their livestock. Illentha, Virien, and Illo circled overhead on carpets extinguishing fires when they spotted them, but the final tally was still depressing. The Varden could still move, but nearly everyone would be overburdened and able to walk less, even on the road.
Courtesy of the recent assassination attempt, Harry felt pressured to drift along with the command party on the march and leave a couple of the Sniper Corps on overwatch above the camp in shifts, watching for active magicians and other malfeasance. It was frustrating to be reminded that no matter his expanded capabilities, he could only be in one place at once. During the diminished time he had to gather materials, Harry was forced to scar the pristine wilderness on the east coast in his haste to keep up with demand and the shortened time he had to do all his chores. Angela did not like being a public figure and was unwilling to teach a bunch of what she called 'incompetent menfolk' how to administer a simple potion, so an experienced non-magical healer named Miriam was tapped to outline triage and when to use the Draught and its dosage guides.
If there was one saving grace about the situation, it was that the attacks hadn't slowed the process of paving. Even though the Varden couldn't keep pace with the speed of road construction, the progress they'd made existed independent of the Varden's speed. If they made it to their destination and the Varden was still picking up slack, Harry could conjure enchanted carts or something to get them moving.
It wasn't as if they hadn't expected it, either. Going the long way 'round meant they were relying on Surda's serviceable but poorer, circuitous roads. The whole detour took three weeks during which the rest of the road out to the Burning Plains was completed, and the stone bridge crossing rose out of the rolling hills ahead, a subject of much celebration that night during Fireside Chats.
Two days later, sulfurous yellow clouds were spotted on the horizon. By that evening, the road ended where the ground transformed from grass to smoldering, squishy peat, an ugly brown and mottled black landscape that seemed to go on forever. They'd arrived, and Galbatorix's army hadn't beaten them to it.
AN: Not super duper happy with this, but my inspiration for this story has been waxing and waning, and I wrote the last segment during a waning phase. DONT WORRY, I feel enough responsibility for having a bunch of people invested in my work that I'm not going to abandon it and leave all THOUSAND of you hanging.
I didn't actually know how to delete guest reviews on my story until a recent guest review took one look at 'The Line' and fucking Olympic long-jumped over it. So thank you for enlightening me. I don't actually care if readers in general say they hate this story and that it's stupid, but not even that one scene I wrote where Roran fought against the Empire soldiers in Carvahall or this chapter's headshot was as graphic as the review in question.
I've been reading On Writing by Stephen King with the goal of improving a lot, and one of the things I've learned is that revision is critical to the production of a good piece of writing, and also the cardinal sin of published works. For this reason, upon the conclusion of this fic, I will probably not post the first chapter of the HP time travel fix it sequel until I have year 1 done to my satisfaction.
I have to ask, how many of you have read Brandon Mull's Fablehaven and/or Dragonwatch series? I was looking through FFN and AO3 for a good read, and there's very, very little in the fandom. Would you all be interested in a Seth-centric time travel fix it? I've written a pilot, and I'm not sure if the interest is there or if I should focus my effort on the myriad of other projects I've started :) Given there are no stories like it in the fandom, I feel bad for everyone who wants to see more of Seth and Kendra and have to wait for Brandon Mull's published works (if he ever writes more).
Lastly, I want to offer you all my sincerest gratitude for enjoying my work and posting reviews that motivate me to continue improving. Even those of you silent readers who did nothing more than tick the 'follow' or 'favorite' boxes, I appreciate it. We hit 1k followers and I'm amazed this project has gathered so much attention. There are so many of you, you wouldn't all fit inside my highschool auditorium, so if I haven't said it before,
Thank you.