list?”
OK’d by a Princess or not, Kevin, the gate guard, checked the papers in his little guard shack and nodded. “Yes, Princess Veronica, he’s right here; Torrence Baker, Tor, Countier four Lairdgren, Squire of Kolbrin, Troll of Galasia, ambassador pro-tem Afrak. With a note that says I shouldn’t point out how short or young he looks or imply that he looks younger than his stated age of seventeen, even though he clearly does. Please come in sir.” The guard smiled at him.
Tor stuck his tongue out at the man, who actually chuckled at the move.
His empty trunk following him, he floated alongside Varley, getting her to go a little bit slower than they could have so that he could ask questions. She answered quickly, her voice sharp but not unkind.
“Um, you’re just the ambassador pro-tem, basically that means “for now”. That way you can go and set up the rivers and things you promised without needing anyone else to guide you around from here. It saves on people and really, I think dad kind of wants to stuff a young looking boy down their throats that they’ll have to be polite, too. They have some trouble with men being in power at all there.” Varley smiled at him.
“And the Troll of Galasia crack?” He asked, walking quickly, giving her a sideways glance.
She just shrugged.
“Sounds like something Alphie would have put in, doesn’t it? I’ve heard worse nicknames though. Makes you sound kind of manly, doesn’t it? I’ll take you to the meeting room. Everyone else, our people here, are already in there making preparations. Well, that and bickering about things. I can’t go in with you. I mean I could, no one would stop me, but I won’t. No one will listen to me and sitting there trying to take notes on what people are arguing about is boring. If you need me I’ll be sitting by the front door with a book.”
She leaned in and tried to kiss him on the cheek, but was blocked by the shield he had turned on. “You know Tor, it makes it a lot harder to connect with people if you live behind a shield all the time. Things aren’t that dangerous. We have guards and walls you know.” Her delicate arms crossed over her small chest, which, Tor noticed absently, wasn’t all that small any more. The girl wasn’t just getting taller, but starting to fill out. She flipped her long auburn hair back slightly and gave him a look that had to be a impersonation of her mother. If it wasn’t then she really needed to get out of the palace more often, because it was almost eerily good.
Tor stuck out his tongue and laughed.
“Really, you should wear your own shield all the time right now, yes, except when you want to kiss someone, I suppose. But I’ve found that having a shield but not using it is about the same as being kicked down stone steps from behind.” That Trice may have done that, well, he managed to keep the tears from his eyes at least. Right, there was a war. No worrying about her right now.
Varley chuckled and raised her eyebrows at him, then winked.
“Alright, I’ll wear my shield more, if you’ll drop yours when I want to kiss you. Deal?” She smiled and tapped her foot impatiently.
“Um, sure?”
Gesturing at him, she waited for him to drop his shield and then kissed him on the lips for about half a minute. He blinked. It was a good kiss, if incredibly improper. She did slap on her own shield when she finished at least, giggling a bit. Blushing he walked through the council chamber door without saying anything after getting his own shield on.
Stone steps and all that, he reminded himself.
The door was heavy, thick wood that was carved with a series of rectangles and stained a flat brown color. In this building where almost everything was a piece of art, this single door looked almost plain. That probably served to show how important it really was. The door handle was iron, pitted with use and age. It turned with a creak and he had to muscle the door open a little. Before it was all the way open Tor double checked to make certain his shield was on, focusing on the field pattern itself so that he wouldn’t risk shutting it off by mistake. He didn’t really know what to expect on the other side after all.
It was chaos.
Or at least the slightly raised voices that could be heard before the door opened were a lot louder. No one was fighting physically, yet, but there was finger pointing and accusations of unpatriotic sentiment. Richard sat at the head of the table with Rolph to his right hand side and the Queen to his left, all looking pretty regal. That made sense, it being in their job description. They’d all probably had lessons in it. Next to Rolph, in a dress too pretty for the room, sat Karina. Her face wasn’t bored, actually managing to look engaged for once, making good eye contact with one of the large, scary men that sat around yelling. He wasn’t a good looking fellow particularly, huge, shaggy bearded, dark, ferocious and rather emphatic as he pointed at a map.
“Here! It’s isolated, close enough to the Capital for troops to be summoned in an emergency, but far enough away that no one will worry about a military take over. It’s the perfect spot!” The place on the map was about fifty miles closer to the Capital than where his little house was, but almost lined up with it otherwise.
What it was the perfect spot for, Tor couldn’t tell from the shouting at first. It sounded like something minor enough, a training base for the military flyer corps. That there was a flyer corps at all was news to him. It probably was a good place for the base, open and with few trees for novice recruits to crash into, except that some things would be hard to come by there. He walked over and pointed to the map, about thirty miles to the right of where the man had been indicating originally.
“Here. There’s water for one thing. You’ll still have to ship in all your food of course, but you can harden the soil into a holding tank with a run off, so the local area won’t suffer from too much loss of water if you’re careful. The soil works with the compaction process well enough. I was just out here,” He pointed over and up by the little stream he’d built next to which didn’t even show on the brittle looking brown paper.
“Yesterday and today working with it. I used excavators to make a small cabin, earlier today.”
Tor snorted loudly and shook his head.
“Of course half of the time it took was because I didn’t know how to put the roof on. More than half really. I don’t know who owns the land, but hopefully they won’t mind a new cabin, because I don’t think it’s going anywhere for a while. It’s at least as hard as stone.”
The man stared at Tor for about fifteen seconds, far too long to be comfortable. Then he reached over to the map and slid the green marker over near the river were Tor had pointed.
“Good point, water. So here then.” His voice had calmed down a lot once someone else in the room seemed to be supporting him at least a little.
The Prince looked forward and nodded.
“I own all that area, pretty much a wasteland, but if you want to use it for a base, that’s no big problem. No trees for building materials… you tried out the system that uses dirt, and turns it into stone you say?” Rolph had seen the excavators and compactors already, even played with them a little, so Tor figured that this restatement of what he’d just said must be for someone else’s benefit. Possibly everyone else, he realized. Why would they know about it at all yet?
Around the people there were sixteen other people, some of them he recognized, Like Counts Ford and Rodriguez. Count Derring sat across the table; a huge oval thing made of real wood that must have been the roughest hewn thing in the whole palace. If it had even been sanded at any point it would have been a surprise and by the cut marks in the wood, real metal tools had been used in its making, not cutters. Either incredibly old or a reconstruction piece worth thousands of gold.
A few people he knew and a lot he didn’t. Tovey gave him a short nod, encouraging him to speak about the building he’d been doing? It seemed a strange topic for a war council but if that’s what they wanted…
For some reason Burks, the servant from the guest house that had been so helpful to him, also sat at the table. Maybe he was there to run errands or something? If so, they couldn’t get a more reliable person for the task.
Why not? They tasked a Princess with meeting people at the gate, even nobodies like him, so why not have a trusted person sit in the room to help out at need?
“That’s right,” he waived his hands in the air as he described things. “It’s fast, using cargo floats I put up a shelter that will probably last a few hundred years short of someone with an explosive weapon going after it. Think of it like large heavy stone. It has a solid foundation and everything. The process is, well, let me short hand it and if anyone wants to see it, or even try it out, for themselves I can arrange that. It takes dirt, pretty much whatever is there and separates out any wet components, bits of leaves, animals or anything else like that, then it compresses it on the primary level until it turns into a single block or sheet, depending on how you set the device. Those are
