She’d had practice for most of her adult life as Mainspring, one of the key cogs that oversaw the Clockwork Brigade. Caris had always admired the way Lore could read people and situations and tailor herself to each in order to gain information. It was a skill Caris lacked. She always felt she was better at engineering than she was with people.
True to Lore’s prediction, the door was pushed open, letting inside the last officer needed for this meeting of military minds. Caris didn’t know his name, but he crisply saluted General Clarence Votil before snapping another one off in Caris’ direction. She nodded an acknowledgment, even as Clarence started speaking.
“With the season change, we’ll be faced with an escalation of attacks now that the snow has melted. The army is implementing strategy for the front lines, but we must also focus on the logistics of our supply lines,” Clarence said.
“Defending our critical cities should also be a priority as well, should it not?” Caris asked, hoping she didn’t sound ignorant of the situation.
“Any city where you are will be defended.”
Caris tried not to flinch at that statement. “A single city does not a country make. The rivers need to be defended as well. Myself and other engineers didn’t spend all winter working on devices only to see them collect dust.”
Clarence nodded. “I know our engineers built new devices to defend the rivers in this province. I commend everyone’s efforts on that front. The transportation and implementation of these new devices is critical, but the Ashion army has very little manpower to spare an escort. Neither do we have the ships necessary to blockade the river farther downstream while the engineering corps works to deploy the devices. Even if we did, we’d have to contend with Urova’s submersibles once word got out, and they’ve proven damnably difficult to target. It’s a risky endeavor right now with Daijal forces entrenching themselves in the province west of the Serpentine Lake for another attack.”
Clarence tapped at the image of the lake on one of the large maps spread out over the table with a pointer stick. This particular map showed the eastern provinces that surrounded the Serpentine Lake and the waterways that branched off it. The maps were gridded in a way favored by wardens as opposed to general cartographers. Different shaded areas showcased the poison fields and the degree of poison embedded in the land. Caris knew these days it had probably spread more than the wardens would have ever allowed in the past.
The date on the map’s corner showed it had been drawn up in the summer of 936, most likely finished before the unconscionable attack on the Warden’s Island in the southeast by the Daijal army. Since then, wardens had pulled out of Daijal and Urova completely, leaving those countries to deal with revenants on their own. If wardens weren’t guarding their assigned borders or working to rebuild the half-destroyed fort on the Warden’s Island, then they were giving aid to the Ashion army where revenants were concerned.
The Poison Accords demanded wardens be neutral for the sake of Maricol’s survival. Queen Eimarille Rourke had broken the agreement in such a way the wardens had been forced to choose a side for the first time in their long-established history.
Their ranks had been thinned in the attack—too many tithes and wardens on the island killed—and the destruction of infrastructure and the loss of historical border reports had dealt a heavy blow. While the underground laboratories had survived, much of the wardens’ alchemy tools and devices used to help cleanse the land and fight revenants not already in use in the poison fields had been destroyed.
These days, the wardens were putting their alchemy skills to use for war.
Many had followed Caris from Veran to Cosian, where the Ashion army command was running the war out of. Caris’ childhood city had become the de facto capital of Ashion, with Amari still occupied by Daijal, the citizens there unable to leave. The Ashion parliament was all but controlled by Eimarille these days, and those who had voted against her favored bills hadn’t been heard from since the gates closed.
The walls still stood around Amari, just as they did around Cosian, and the wardens had worked to keep it that way in the east. Ksenia, a master alchemist, had overseen the wall defense upgrades for most of autumn before leaving for the Warden’s Island. The warden who had taken her place as advisor to Caris and Meleri Auclair, Duchess of Auclair and Lore’s mother, was a tall man with a grizzled look to his weather-worn face at odds with the smoothness of his voice.
Enmei understood alchemy as well as any warden, but he excelled more as an engineer. He’d been in E’ridia when the Warden’s Island had almost fallen, and his knowledge had thankfully not been taken from them. Caris had given Enmei free rein of her company’s laboratories in Cosian. They’d worked together throughout winter, along with other civilian and military engineers, to create new devices to aid in the war effort. Many of those had gone into production in nearby factory towns more used to sending heavy farming equipment and mining tools off the line rather than war machines.
Some of those devices were why Caris had tried to convince Clarence she should be allowed beyond the walls, a request that had been immediately denied. Meleri had also been adamantly against her leaving, despite knowing that securing the river that provided Cosian water was critical.
Aside from being able to hear clarion crystals sing better than anyone, Caris’ command of starfire was more than enough to keep herself safe against revenants and Daijalan soldiers. No one else was in agreement with her. Meleri insisted using starfire would put a target on Caris’ back. She’d been warned to cast it only as a last resort whenever she was allowed to travel, for if the enemy knew she was beyond Cosian’s walls, they’d muster a team of Blades or worse to neutralize her.
Caris had lived with a warrant hanging over her head since the protest in Amari last year and refused to be cowed by such a threat, not when she had other problems to worry about. Urova, with their icebreaker ships and submersibles capable of traveling through frozen-over rivers, had launched a dozen attacks against Cosian during winter. Nine months on since the start of the war, with winter fading away in Ashion everywhere but on the mountaintops, the Ashion army was struggling to stop Daijal’s advance.
Enmei uncrossed his arms and picked up another pointer stick. He used it to tap at the mouth of the river that branched off in an easterly direction from the Serpentine Lake. “Blockading the river isn’t advisable. You risk your barges and ships if you do and putting the other side on notice that something is going on. Your submersibles on watch duty near the fork haven’t signaled to the soldiers on land of any approach by Urovan forces in the last few days. If we’re going to implement the crystal-breaking devices, now is the time to do so.”
“We’re ready to load the airships,” Caris said.
Clarence’s gaze flicked to where she stood shoulder to shoulder between Enmei and Lore, watched over by a trio of Royal Guards in their distinctive uniforms. “I’d ask that you remain inside the walls, Your Royal Majesty.”
“If you won’t let me see the devices to the river, I’ll see them onto the airships.”
“She’d be safe enough at the river if you let her go, especially if she wore a veil. No one would know who she was,” Enmei said.
Clarence frowned deeply. “No.”
Enmei shrugged in the face of that flat denial, catching Caris’ eye. “We’ll hope the readouts match the results we obtained here in the laboratories. I’ll know what to look for.”
“If they don’t, then I’ll make my way to the river,” Caris promised.
Clarence seemed appalled by that statement. “Your Royal Majesty?—”
“I understand everyone’s concern about my safety, but my concern revolves around the safety of everyone in this city and those towns residing by the rivers. If the clarion crystals need to be recut for any reason, I’m the only one who can do that quickly on the spot. I hear the way clarion crystals sing better than anyone.”
Every nation cut clarion crystals differently. Steam power had long been the predominant form of providing heat and energy throughout every Age. While magicians could cast magic with energy drawn from the aether through clarion crystal–tipped wands, engineers had been studying the use of clarion crystals as a power source for some time now.
Televoxes were one such device come into recent play, used by every nation’s military as well as by government officials, to say nothing of those who claimed bloodlines written down in the nobility and royal genealogies. Powered by clarion crystals, the communication devices had no need of the wires that connected telephones and telegraph machines.
