up, so why not? Hopefully she’d be able to give it away or something. It was a lot more than she needed just for herself. Maybe she could sell some of it? If nothing else it was on copper and that had some value.
Trice gave him a little hug on the way out.
It wasn’t lost on him that she’d almost stopped touching him since everything had happened. Probably getting ready to cut ties, but not wanting to do it while the whole poisoning thing hung over her family’s heads like it did. That plus the fact that he still looked like crud. His face, not normally meaty anyway, looked even thinner and more pale than he’d ever been before. If this kept up he’d end up a walking skeleton. Not that it mattered overly. It wasn’t like his looks had ever gotten him women before.
He did manage to finally get back to work and make a new, decently complex, device that didn’t have any use he could think of, but that still got him a good mark in his novel build class. He needed to get back to working on useful things though. A device like the one he just made, that did nothing but listen to a sound and then regenerate it when the plate was activated properly, probably wouldn’t have any purpose at all. It was a fun toy, allowing people to talk and then repeat things perfectly later, but that wouldn’t help a real person, would it?
After lunch, about three weeks later, he decided that it was time to at least make a showing at the weapons practice sessions, even if he wasn’t up to working yet. The truth was that he’d run out of copper for templates a few days before and couldn’t make copies of anything. That had been about his only recreation for a while, so he really missed having something useful to do when it suddenly ended. Plus, the room was filled with enough devices at the moment that he could very possibly open up his own little store if he wanted.
Sara had laughed at him when he mentioned that.
“You’re kidding right? You have more inventory than most device shops in the entire kingdom here. Plus it’s all Tor stuff, so you know its quality. All you need is a shop front…” Her look went calculating, but she’d stopped talking. So if she had an idea, Tor didn’t know about it. It was an idea though, if he got stuck for money, he could always open his own little shop and sell his junk to unsuspecting people.
That’s what he was thinking about when he walked into the training square. No one was retuleing, instead they were all trying to shift around a half dozen stone squares that must have weighed about five tons each, easy. Kolb saw him and smiled, waving him over.
“Tor! Just the man I need. We’re finally paving the upper right corner here, but we have to get these stones cut into one inch thick slabs. Apparently thanks to your new cargo plates, it was cheaper to ship these uncut, but right now, we can’t move them, and none of our cutters have a long enough sweep to do the job, miss by about a foot and a double cut never works with those things. If you’re off at all the stones come out uneven or break. I’m going to go to the Dean and complain about this right now, but we still have to do something about it. Can you take care of it? Don’t just build a cutter, and definitely don’t try to move the stones yourself! I don’t have to be a doctor to see you’re still not a hundred percent.”
Cut the stones without a cutter? Could he do that?
It was, he knew, technically possible. Tor had even generated a few fields that were strong enough to do things on occasion, on the fly so to speak, unanchored things. They’d fade though and this was a lot of cuts if he had to build a new field for it each time…
Well, that was the assignment, so he’d try at least. Kolb wouldn’t set him the task if it wasn’t part of training, even if it did seem unlikely. The man was hard, but he’d gotten Tor to come up with those shields, and the flying stuff, hadn’t he? So far Kolb was right about what he could do if he really tried, no matter how insane what he asked had sounded. Sighing Tor nodded.
“Alright. I can do it.”
That got a slap on the shoulder before Kolb stalked off.
Someone had already set up a cutting guide, just two boards about an inch thick that normally you’d run a cutter down with it activated, so all the slices would be straight and true. Cool. Now all he had to do was get it in place, and get a few of the giant weapons brutes to grab the stones when they came off, so that they wouldn’t fall each time. That part was the most difficult for him, which Kolb undoubtedly knew. It was probably why he’d been told to do it that way instead of just using floats from his room.
“Um, excuse me please?” Tor looked around as about half the people stared at him.
“Kolb ask me to see to these stones, but I’m not allowed to use a cutter, or move them myself. So if I get these into slabs, can you all help get them into place?”
No one said anything, but Karen walked over grinning and patted him on the back and Petra smiled at him gently. Right, he’d been out for a while and had been spotty before that. Tor was just glad they hadn’t decided that a sound thrashing was in order to help him remember to come. Yet at least. They were probably waiting for him to recover a little more. Well, that was polite of them. Also it gave him time to come up with a way to avoid the punishment.
It took a lot more concentration than he was used to using in order to get the first field up. He could feel it but it was tentative and weak. He went slow and made sure that the cut was as perfect as he could manage. It wasn’t good enough, the cut didn’t show, if it had happened at all and the stone stayed intact.
Alright.
He squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and made another one, not starting the cut until the field was strong enough this time, so it took a full minute before he could even move and four more before he started the cut. This time the slab came free.
He didn’t want to let the field go, but had to, in order to not accidentally hack anyone’s limbs off as he repositioned the cutting guide and his hand. That, he knew, wouldn’t make anyone happy. For one thing it would make a mess. He let the field go and stepped back while one of the smaller giants reset the cutting guide for him, which was handy. Then he did it again, and again. It took nearly three hours to get all the slabs cut and down on the ground, longer than it should have, because as he got tired near the end his concentration flagged a bit, making a few of the cuts not work right. They lost two slabs that way, breaking off near the bottom, still attached in a narrow strip as the cutting field failed, but they didn’t need them all for the space, so maybe it would be all right.
They were cut stone though. He hadn’t used a cutter, but he may as well have as far as how polished and slick the pieces all looked. They’d need to make them rougher unless being slick was part of the point, to make them harder to stand on when fighting? No one knew, so they just waited for Kolb to come back. Karen got to him first and asked, but that didn’t deter Kolb from walking directly over to Tor first.
“I thought I said not to just build a cutter for it. I have to admit it looks good, but…” Large bald head tilting to the right, Kolb stared at him. Hard and a little angrily.
Karen came to his rescue. Smiling proudly even.
“All direct effect, no cutter involved at all. It was kind of neat really. There must be what, three people in the kingdom that could manage that? He wasn’t even in combat rage or anything. That could be dead handy in a fight, once he practices up with it a bit. So far it was a little slow… But do we rough it up or leave it smooth?”
Rough it up was the answer. Tor was half way through the design of a complicated device that would make small and irregular pits in the surface of the material when one of the guys he didn’t know grabbed a few handfuls of sand and started scuffing it around with his boots. It didn’t make deep marks, but the lines were enough. Chuckling at how simple the solution had been, Tor grabbed a handful of sand and started on his own square.
Not everything needed magic after all.
The practice square looked sharp by the time Tor felt tired enough to leave, dragging just a little from the light work of scuffing his feet like that. It was really kind of pitiful. Worse, he knew for a fact that both Kolb and Karen noticed. They didn’t say anything about it at least. He’d have to start running again soon, he decided.
Or maybe walking? Slowly?
Yeah, that sounded a lot more reasonable.
The next set of visitors he got kind of surprised him, because he wouldn’t have expected them to come and visit him in a million years. They arrived with a full retinue and headed straight to the headmasters offices. Tor learned all this when he was summoned and Rolph had to take him over, because Tor didn’t know where that actually was.
Karina and Varley sat in well padded chairs waiting for him.
“Tor!” Varley jumped up and nearly tackled him with a hug. The move made him stagger more than a little bit because the girl outweighed him now. Not by a lot, but with her growth and his weight loss, they seemed to have traded places. Sigh. Now everyone he knew away from home was bigger than he was. She had her hair up in the
