to Joe. He’ll get you whatever you need,” I told him brusquely. Since our ill-fated escape from Albamarl our ranks had swelled by another two hundred men. We now had more than enough men for the dam project as well as the building of more temporary shelters for the winter. Food didn’t look like it would be a problem either; we had taken far more from the king’s ware-houses than we would need, far more than he had stolen from us.
Angus sighed, “It’s not more labor I need. It’s a basic problem with the base, there’s no way we can finish this thing when you want it. The foundation isn’t sufficient, it won’t hold up till spring if we keep building on what’s there.”
I was annoyed. Since his arrival I had heard a lot from Angus about what we ‘couldn’t’ do. He had the same perfectionist traits that had made my father a skilled blacksmith. But where Royce had been willing to consider what ‘might’ be possible, Angus seemed only to see what wasn’t possible. Of course I hadn’t given him any personal support since I had returned. Given the purely mundane resources currently at his disposal it might have been reasonable for him to despair of ever finishing the dam. In a sense his failure was my fault. Like everything else, I thought to myself.
“I’ll come down and look at it. We can talk about it there,” I told him. Today would be as good as any to begin testing my new ideas for the dam. Maybe it would cheer the dour man up, but I doubted it.
Hours later we stood looking up at the dam my father had started. It rose twenty feet now; the stones at its base were large, five foot by five. Above that they were smaller, a foot and a half on each side. Water spilled over in the center where a channel had been left near the top, to prevent the rising water from overwhelming what had already been built. The water behind it was already fifteen feet deep and stretched from one side of the narrow entrance to Shepherd’s Rest to the other.
“I can’t keep building up,” Angus complained. “The foundation isn’t big enough to support it. If the water gets any deeper the water will start to seep through and undermine the foundation.”
I was feeling contrary, “Why?”
Angus sighed again, “The pressure, the deeper it gets the greater the pressure down at the bottom will be. And that mortar your father used isn’t right for building under water, its already starting to erode.”
I bristled at the implication my father had made a mistake but I held my temper. “What if the water froze solid?” I asked him.
“What do you mean?”
“I can freeze the water behind the dam,” I stated.
“It’ll expand and crack the stones. As soon as it melted the whole thing would start coming down,” he replied. The tone in his voice implied he was talking to a child.
“It won’t melt,” I assured him.
“More water will keep coming; it’ll still ruin what we’ve built.”
“Then I’ll freeze that as well. Imagine this… I’ll turn what’s behind that wall into something like a glacier. As more water builds up I’ll freeze it as well. Then all you’ll need to build is a retaining wall, just enough to hold the fresh water at the top till I can freeze it as well,” I said.
“I’d say that’s crazy talk. You can’t keep freezing it forever and as soon as it began to melt the whole damn thing would come down,” Angus waved his arms as he spoke, agitation clear in his body language.
My temper snapped, “I don’t need it to last forever! I only need it to last long enough to kill a goddamn army in the spring. Don’t you get it Angus? That’s all I care about, killing as many damned people as possible!”
His face blanched as I spoke, “If that thing fails while the men are up there it’ll kill people long before the army gets here.”
“Then I’ll just be a murderer that much sooner,” I spat out. “Watch.” I walked to the wall and selected the biggest foundation stone, the one that stood in the center, blocking the old river bed. Using spells the same spells I had been repeating day after day on the iron bombs I created an enchantment to store energy within the stone. It had become such a habit it only took me a few minutes, despite the size of the stone. After that I modified the wards I used to store heat so they would draw heat from the water on the other side of the stone. I changed it slightly so it would work much more rapidly, then I released the spell to do its work.
At first nothing happened, so I led Angus up onto the dam itself, so we could see the water behind the wall. It was hard to see, but ice was forming below the surface. “I want you to start building a new wall, outside this one. It doesn’t need to be strong, just enough to capture any water that leaks through. No more than a foot thick, build it up on the dry side using the foundation that juts beyond this dam.”
“It won’t be strong enough to hold much,” he said rubbing his chin.
“It doesn’t have to be. Just build it quickly; I need it as tall as the dam itself within a week, after that it will need to keep up with the rising water. I’ll keep freezing the water out there to prevent it from putting much pressure on your secondary wall,” I told him.
In the end, he agreed, not that I gave him a choice. I spent the rest of the day enchanting the foundation stones, reasoning that they would be the best place to start. Plus they had the advantage of being the largest stones which meant they could hold more before exploding. Since they weren’t meant to be bombs I added a limiter to the heat absorption spell to stop it long before the stones were close to their limit. An explosion now would destroy any hope we had of completing the project before the spring.
The week passed slowly as I worked to freeze the water behind the dam. To speed our trips back and forth I created a teleportation circle at the dam site, with a matching one back in Cameron Castle. I made a side trip one afternoon to do the same at Lancaster, in the duke’s own suite. I didn’t want to think about the fact that if I had done that sooner Marc might have been able to get back in time to save my father, but I felt the guilt anyway.
Each morning I returned to the dam site. Once the largest stones within the dam were enchanted ice had formed out to a distance of more than forty feet beyond the dam itself. Water quickly began rising over the top and spilling across the center, cutting a channel in the ice there and threatening to washout the new retaining wall, to prevent that I got more ambitious. Moving up the smaller valley I found a massive boulder that was nearly submerged by the rising water. It was irregularly shaped, having formed long ago when the river had cut through the softer stone around it.
I had no way to estimate, but it had to weigh several hundred tons, at least. Working carefully I enchanted it and watched the ice begin forming around it. While I worked on freezing the river over the past few days I had had thoughts about how we would destroy the dam in the spring. The danger of storing so much energy in the stones had one welcome side-effect, it made for a simple method of destroying the dam come spring. I included a glass bead in my enchantment of several of the foundation stones, as well as with the enchantment of the large boulder. I was fairly sure that destroying them would cause a chain reaction.
Winter passed slowly, with a growing sense of trepidation. I added another teleportation circle to the road near Arundel, so I could more easily check on that end of the valley. I also started regular patrols along the western end of the valley. Our plan would be for naught if the enemy came early and caught us unprepared.
By midwinter I had produced more than two thousand of the iron-bombs, each with its own glass activator. Marc, in a moment of inspiration suggested we create a large wooden table, covered with a map of the valley. It took several weeks but once it was complete we added small depressions to it, marking the locations where the bombs would be. As each piece of iron was hidden along the road the glass stone to activate it was placed on the table at the spot the bomb was located.
The change in our dam building strategy freed a lot of men up from laboring there. The smaller retaining wall was much easier to build. The temporary housing had already been completed as well, so I set the free men to digging a massive ditch. As they dug a massive earthen berm was created alongside it. We built a flimsy wooden palisade atop that. As defensive structures went, it was poorly made, but we had no time to build better. If things went as I hoped we wouldn’t have to defend it from very many attackers anyway. Pits were dug in the area behind the earthworks and filled with massive stone blocks before being reburied. I had run out of iron, but I had a plan that would require them to be there, should the worst befall us.
Through it all my mother and Penny watched me carefully. I felt their eyes on me as I went about my tasks. Penny in particular had to be by my side nearly constantly. In her face I could see worry, she didn’t like the changes she was seeing. “When was the last time you smiled Mort?” she asked one day late in the winter.
I considered the question seriously, “Hmm, probably the day my father died. Why?”
“You’ve been quiet. You never smile, or talk… except to give instructions. You seem obsessed with the coming war,” she answered with a frown.
“Obsession is a good thing when you’re planning a war. I don’t have time to be planning dances and parties,”
