The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

++Losses everywhere. The more I try, the more failed attempts I rack up. I have devised weapons even I would not have thought possible a year ago, assembled armies large enough to blot out whole regions in their shadow, left the earth trembling with my hordes. It is not enough.++

- Fragment of Lord Dread’s archives, date indeterminate.

Blakely didn’t like magic weapons, all else being equal.

He wasn’t as superstitious as he had been, in that he no longer thought they were demonically possessed or that they wanked him off in his sleep, but he still didn’t like the things. They were just too…new. Experimental and weird and changeable. Pick a gun off the factory line and you knew what you were getting; a piece of shit, yes, but a consistent piece of shit. Magic weapons had none of that. Each one was some magician’s baby, his little masterwork.

In practice, that generally meant that they were made by monomaniacs who’d had a very particular vision in mind during the creation process, and would sooner make something that got its wielder killed than compromise on that vision.

His heat ray was a rare example of one that was…okay. It’d been in circulation for twenty years, and its creator had made so many on demand that he’d gotten good at them. A lot of idiot collectors liked the thing because it was from some stupid science fiction novel, but career soldiers liked it because they knew there were hundreds of others that’d been battle-tested. Even now that the original maker had stopped producing them himself, other magicians had taken up work under him to continue replicating his design, and they did it pretty damned precisely. Blakely had only ever heard of two exploding in such a way as to injure their wielders, and from his cursory investigation it’d sounded like the wielders in question had been idiots anyway.

His own heat ray rested on his back. A bit big and very heavy, it was nonetheless a reassuring weight rather than an unbalancing one. Feeling its presence was a constant reminder that he could actually do something if an enemy magician showed up encased in an indestructible shield.

But the new magical item before him, the one he’d been called on to examine now, was not nearly as well-tested as that. Blakely was fighting his every instinct just to keep from bolting away from it right now.

“What’s it called?” he asked Vornholt as he ran an eye over the great cannon-thing mounted on top of the wall.

“I have not named it,” she shrugged, sounding disinterested at the very idea. Vornholt was like that sometimes. Girlishly enthusiastic one moment, cold as ice the next. Blakely suspected that even she didn’t know what she was really interested in.

The cannon itself was pretty fucking interesting, if nothing else. The whole thing stretched about twelve feet from ass to head, and it was far thicker than he’d have expected from a normal one. At its base, the barrel bulged into a giant sphere, almost like some chemist’s mixing flask but much larger. From there, a more conventional, cylindrical barrel protruded another three yards until the tip. The metal of its construction was bright steel rather than cold iron, and the whole thing hummed with magical energy.

“You…reinforced the barrel with enchantments?” he asked.

Vornholt seemed surprised. “You can tell what the magic does?”

“I know it’s there because the air is popping,” he elaborated. Mana often interfered with the air in ways that let even a normal guy like him, with no sense for it at all, hear the physical effects. “The ‘what’ is just a guess.”

She nodded. “Well it was the correct one. Partly. The barrel is enchanted to slowly self-repair over time. The magic used is miniscule, since I did not have time to work on these for long, but it should fully restore itself every year or so.”

Blakely did not like that. This barrel was thick, probably half again as thick as mundane cannon barrels. The idea that Vornholt had to make something that durable capable of healing itself made very strong and very eerie implications about the kinds of force it’d be shooting with.

Actually, he’d seen those forces himself. He’d seen the explosive effects, and even if he hadn’t Blakely was staring at the result of them now marring a rock bigger than most houses. The sheer power wasn’t news to him, but the idea that it was more than the cannon’s physical structure could handle was. Not welcome news either.

“I want your assessment of how to best make use of them,” Vornholt continued while Blakely stared and thought and tried not to start screaming and stabbing people.

“Assessment how?” he asked, throat dry.

“Fire it a few times,” she told him. “Tell me what it is like and how it handles, and then suggest what to do with it.”

Blakely wanted to argue desperately, but things had changed in stakes since he accompanied Vornholt back to Garamon. They were facing down an oncoming assault now, and anything less than total obedience would…not be appreciated.

“Alright,” he croaked.

Firing the cannon was actually pretty easy, at least. Most enchanted items apparently had permanently ongoing effects. This one sort of did, but those effects only worked in synergy, and that required connections between them that were only formed with the touch of mechanical controls.

He considered that a point in its favour. Simple, physical controls rather than the weirder, fancier shit other magicians went for may not have been safer, but they at least reduced the overall amount of magic involved, which Blakely considered good for its own sake.

The thing had a turning mechanism, which was also good since the alternative would probably have been getting two strong men to put their whole weight on levers just to adjust the fucking thing, that saw it gliding from one facing to another with about a hundred-and-twenty degree cone of fire. Blakely liked that too, it meant the cannons couldn’t be aimed on the refinery should the wall be taken, while still giving them plenty of coverage.

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Then came the test firing, the worst part. His heart was in his mouth as the energy discharged from the cannon. Vornholt had warned him not to look anywhere near the mouth of the gun as it fired off, but even with his head tilted away and his eyes clamped shut the light it produced stung a bit. The noise, weirdly enough, was not nearly as bad, though the actual impact sounds were far louder than any cannon he’d ever heard.

For destructive power, it was golden. One shot from the thing would probably poke right through a warship’s hull and mangle its insides like a knife to the gut. But range was a concern. Pure gunpowder cannons only a third of its weight would still sling a projectile farther. That was the first thing he brought up to Vornholt.

Enchanted items usually took a long time to tinker with, but Vornholt surprised him by just rearranging this one’s innards a bit before asking that he fire again. This time the range was better, though the power far lower.

“Is there a way to make adjustments on the fly without you?” Blakely asked the girl.

“No, but I will reconfigure the cannons to make them able to switch between these two extremes as necessary.”

Blakely frowned. “You didn’t wait to make a prototype before having me test it?”

She glared at him.

“I have made the physical shapes, which are easy enough to rework and modify, but the magic has still yet to be finalized.”

So Blakely would be determining the specifications of the main defensive artillery for this refinery. No pressure then.

“How are you going to find the time to do all this?” he asked abruptly. “Aren’t you using magic to keep the refinery afloat?”

“I have machines, enchanted workings, that are doing that in the restricted sections,” Vornholt explained.

Blakely paused. He didn’t know much about magic, but he knew that anything enchanted could work for just about eternity. If Vornholt was able to make enchantments able to do so much industrial work, in the brief windows of time she’d had while doing all the other jobs he’d seen from her, then why the hell wasn’t she just making her fortune selling that?

Nope. That was a suspicion, which were good when directed at probable threats, but when aimed at anyone with both power and secrets tended to get you killed. Dave Blakely hadn’t lived this long by fucking with people who had the ability to crush him whenever they wanted.

He saw to a few more test shots and made some more suggestions, then was let go.

Dave didn’t know what to do with free time at the moment. In fact, he didn’t know what to do with it at the best of times. It wasn’t that there was nothing he enjoyed, just that enjoyment was usually expensive and dangerous in ways he couldn’t afford.

He was better paid now than when he’d been serving the Baron, and had been better paid by the Baron than in the army.

But he also lived in the middle of a desert, which meant there wasn’t exactly much to spend that income on. Assuming he wasn’t shorted by the time he quit—which was likely—Dave hoped to be out of here and back in Garamon within five years. Five years of this salary would leave him able to fend for himself, for a while at least. And then he’d have no more ties to Isabel Vornholt and her secrets, and thus suffer no risk of going down with her.

That was the theory at least. Dave always tried not to get tied down to a single job for too long, or at least not for too much action. Serving the Vornholts had brought relatively little incident for close to fifteen years now, but things had been heating up for a while. He needed out.

Hopefully, this upcoming attack would be his last major fire fight.

“Do you have a minute?” Came a voice from behind him. The words had just about finished coming by the time Dave spun around with his handgun aimed into the speaker’s face. She screamed and threw up her hands, like she meant to ward off a bullet with bare flesh. By then Dave had recognised Alira Bella Paula and realised he wasn’t being attacked.

“What do you want?” he asked, irritably pocketing the revolver.

The woman took a few seconds to answer for some reason, continuously false-starting-and-stopping in her speech, like her lungs were spasming.

“I wanted to talk to you about Isabel’s new weapons,” she said at last.

“Oh. They’re good.” Dave didn’t like admitting it, but credit was certainly due there.

She asked a bunch of followup questions, any one of which she could’ve just approached a random mercenary and gotten answered adequately. Fortunately, she was eventually satisfied that the giant fucking guns would, in fact, help protect them from threats.

And then it was Dave’s turn to ask a few questions, more out of impulse and sudden, ill-advised curiosity than fear.

“What’s Vornholt like?” he asked her. “You met her years ago right? After me, I guess, but you got to know her early on. I mostly just watched her from the shadows and made sure nobody walked over and tried to murder her.”

And she’d made even that difficult with all her sneaking around, the little bitch.

“When I first met her?” Paula asked.

“Yeah.”

The woman got a sort of wistful look in her eyes. “I hated her at first. This little girl effortlessly showing up in a place I’d dreamed of being for years. And she was more gifted than me to boot, outshining me without even trying. But she also…didn’t care about me coming from the lower classes, nor being a woman for obvious reasons. That was what won me over eventually.”

“That she wasn’t an arsehole to you?” Blakely asked.

Paula chuckled. “That she just didn’t seem to care about it all. I don’t mean in the normal way, of thinking that sort of thing is wrong and actively opposing it, more like…I don’t know. Like she couldn’t be bothered with it. Like it was annoying to her that people wasted energy on it. It’s one thing to see someone look at that and say it’s wrong and bad, but Isabel…she treated it like everyone else were squabbling children.” The woman shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess that appealed to me back then. There’s something invincible about it, isn’t there? Not just disagreeing with the rest of the world, but considering them stupid for even going against you. That certainty was…just what I needed to see.”

He blinked. “You’re talking about an eight year-old.”

Paula’s face was bright red suddenly. “Yeah, well so is everyone else when they talk about how creepy she was back then.”

Dave had to admit there was something to that. Age had never seemed to be a barrier for Vornholt’s ability to unnerve people.

What if she was a demon? No, an ancient lich, that crawled up from the abyss to possess the body of an infant and—

…Dave was doing it again. He made himself push the paranoid worry aside and focus on the here and now.

The truth was he’d clocked that there was something odd about Isabel Vornholt years ago, but he wasn’t being paid enough to clock things. Dave ended his break, got back up onto his feet, and got back to work.

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