Siege of Stone

CHAPTER 68

Inside her villa, Elsa sat in the courtyard next to her peaceful fountain. The sound of the running water helped inspire her, and Nathan felt the same. She had sheets of paper and a stylus on which she drew experimental designs, spell-forms, and connecting runes that she could activate using transference magic.

Nathan had taken several old volumes from Renn’s cluttered library, tomes of magical lore that the wizard had shared with Lani. Nathan felt a pang for what had happened to the sorceress. He rubbed the scar on his chest, feeling occasional slivers of phantom pain in his heart.

General Utros had no idea how weakened the wizards of Ildakar had become, so many powerful duma members gone. Nathan was determined to find some other unexpected defense before the ancient general recovered enough to make a new move. “Dear spirits, how do we do this ourselves?” he muttered, but Elsa was too deep in concentration to hear him.

She bit her lower lip as she scribbled small designs and added connecting lines. “Transference magic is usually a stage-to-stage spell, one spell-form connected to a counterpart, using the magic in an even exchange, but in order to increase the power, maybe we can segregate, then amplify it.” She tapped her stylus on the paper where she had drawn eight smaller runes in a circle and connected them like the spokes of a wheel. “Through a central point, we can widen the flow, like a pipe delivering water.” She glanced over at her fountain. “If the pipe is only as wide as your finger, that limits the amount of water you can transport. But if we widen the conduit to a foot in diameter, imagine the water we could deliver.” She scribbled on her paper, then glanced up at Nathan, who was looking at her with admiration.

“I see what you mean, my dear,” he said. “Are you suggesting it might be possible to flood the entire plain and wash away the siege?”

“That might do, but it’s not necessarily destructive enough,” Elsa said. “I was thinking of a flood of magic. Let me keep developing this.”

Glad to be in the other woman’s company, Nathan paged through the books. He saw notations Renn had made in the margins, but the portly wizard had not been in the mind-set for war when he did his research. He’d been looking for ways to combine wind chimes and fountains for his own villa.

After several hours of his fruitless searching, while Elsa expanded her transference runes, they both needed to rise and stretch. “Let’s go see what Olgya is doing in the silk spinners’ guild,” Elsa suggested. “We shouldn’t dismiss any possible advantage. Maybe she has come up with something.”

“I am curious about the weaving operations myself,” Nathan said. He had cleaned his white robes and admired the cool and comfortable silk. “Her new enhanced fabrics are nearly as good as armor. If you will lead the way?”

They walked through the nobles’ district, passing citrus orchards and lush flower beds. The trees along the next boulevard had darker leaves and were manicured into rounded shapes, but some were entirely stripped of leaves. Workers stood under the trees with baskets, plucking leaves in a swift methodical motion. “What are they doing?” Nathan asked. “Are the leaves used for food? Medicine? Spices, maybe?”

“They are mulberry leaves.” When she realized he didn’t understand the significance, Elsa added, “Silkworms prefer to eat mulberry leaves.”

Ahead, Nathan saw a large open structure with tall support beams and cross braces over the roof. Smaller open storehouses were stacked with bolts of colorful cloth, one on top of the other, like rolled rainbows.

Dozens of people moved in and out, including workers with baskets full of dark leaves. Doorway curtains breathed in and out as a pair of men hurried along with a bolt of bright red silk. Nathan heard the voices of workers inside the building, along with another sound … rustling, rattling, whispering. Elsa pushed aside the gray doorway curtain and led him into the cavernous warehouse.

Nathan felt as if he had fallen into the web of a tunnel spider. The walls and rafters were covered with meshed webs, sheets of silken strands that extended for twenty or thirty feet. Drooping banners hung down like the sides of a sagging tent. He smelled a sweet resinous scent that clung to the fibers.

Workers dumped baskets of leaves into wide troughs, and Nathan saw green worms as long as his forearm, chewing and squirming. With their blind, flat heads, they gorged themselves like maggots on rotted flesh. Men and women bustled about, stepping around Nathan and Elsa.

Olgya stood near several rattling and clacking looms where workers fed in the raw silk threads and created sheets of the marvelous fabric. She quickly finished her instructions to the weavers, then turned to Nathan and Elsa with a frown. “Is this duma business? We are working as swiftly as we can.”

“We just wanted to have a better understanding of your efforts,” Nathan said. “I have never seen silk weaving before.”

“The worms make the silk strands,” Olgya said. “We make the fabric.” Tense with her desperate work, she was a wiry mass of energy. Her silk robes were patterned with beautiful designs, primarily green and blue with a flash of red and orange. Her many ribboned clumps of hair looked somewhat disheveled. “The worms eat and eat, and they mature in only a few days, thanks to fleshmancy, and they no longer go into a pupa. They used to mature over time and then spin their cocoons, which we unraveled for the silk, one cocoon per worm. These altered worms are different, larger, and they produce large, furry cocoons that provide all the silk we need, and they remain worms for at least ten cycles. They spin a cocoon and then go back to eating until they’re fattened up, and soon spin another cocoon.”

Green, quivering worms crawled out of the troughs, finding a perch in a network of dowels and false branches, where they extruded glistening strands from spinnerets. Even as the cocoons hardened, workers detached an anchor line of the threads and then rolled the fibers onto wooden batons, which they took over to the looms.

“And this silk will help in the war effort?” Nathan asked.

Olgya showed them the magical loom, a clattering wooden machine with metal hinges, wires, and cross wires that held the emerging fabric. Runes carved in the wood glowed a pale blue, and the silk fibers absorbed some of that glow as the cloth grew inch by inch. Weavers used their gift to guide the process.

“The new silk is highly protective.” Olgya took them to the far end of the loom, where the fabric emerged. “Special pigments further enhance its strength, but this is already ten times stronger than normal silk and it can protect our people against the blows of enemy soldiers, like fine mesh armor.” She gave Nathan a challenging glance, noting the ornate sword he wore at his side. “Try to cut this silk with your blade. Thrust the point right through.”

Nathan withdrew his sword. It felt good to hold the weapon, and he poked the sword into the silk, but the sharp point didn’t cut through.

“Harder!” Olgya commanded.

He stabbed downward so that the fabric belled out, showing the pointed shape of the tip, but he couldn’t pierce the cloth.

“Harder!”

Nathan pulled back and thrust with all his strength, jabbing and jabbing as if the cloth represented his most hated enemy, but he still couldn’t pierce it. The cloth remained rigid enough to stop most of the damage to the skin of its wearer. “I must say I am impressed.”

“Enemy arrows or blades cannot penetrate it. Our soldiers will be safe, although it was not enough to protect my Jed.” Her firm voice suddenly cracked. “That boy did not want to fight, and he paid the ultimate price. I never thought to raise him as a soldier, since he was the son of a gifted noble. Why should he ever have to worry about being killed in battle?” She shuddered, and then her expression became stony again. “We all have to fight. We all do our part, even the silkworms.” She looked at the thick cobwebs of fresh silk fiber. “We are driving them to burn their energy, and some of them don’t survive.”

Three silkworms drooped over the edge of a trough and fell, flaccid and limp. Workers plucked the soft bodies and cast them into a basket full of dead worms, while others dumped in more mulberry leaves for the thriving worms to devour.

Nathan listened to the chitter and rustle of the voracious creatures as they ate leaves and spun their cocoons, as the loom rattled and clacked, as the workers rolled the fresh silk fabric and carried it to the storehouse.

“We each do our part,” Elsa repeated. “Because if we fail, Ildakar fails, and then we all die.” She turned to Nathan with an incongruous grin on her face. “But I have just realized exactly what to do with my transference magic, and how I can smash a good portion of the siege army. I think this will work!”