Page 14 of Beyond

That started them off, bickering and calling each other names. This was why their seats were positioned out of hitting range of each other.

Kordas grabbed Hakkon by the elbow and pulled him out before cups started flying.

Hakkon scratched his head as they emerged into the short hallway that led back into the rest of the manor. “Are they always like that?”

Kordas snickered. “Sometimes they’re worse. But, I’ll also say that despite the wardings in there, and with us—” he tapped the Crest of Valdemar on his baldric, then flipped it over a bit to show the layers of metal, lace, and wood hidden under it—“they still speak in code and implication. It might have sounded like pointless banter, but in truth, they were telling us valuable hints about what to think and how to do things just then. It’s a sort of game they play. Still, if I were you, I would warn Jonaton about the fact that his thievery is not a secret to the Circle. I’m pretty sure Dole was serious.”

“Oh.” Hakkon looked back at the closed door. “Right.”

“Come on, I need your calculating brain,” Kordas said, tugging at his elbow. “There are many steps in making perfect stuffed bread.”

Hakkon looked deeply baffled for six seconds more, then understanding dawned on his face. “They—oh. I only listened to the words, not what they could have meant,” Hakkon replied, actually blushing. “It was like those weird story problems I read to you when you were first learning magic.”

“A truth of magic is that we never stop learning, or the magic fades. New spellwork is invigorated by new knowledge, while if a mage stops new learning, they stagnate away into dull despondency,” Kordas said as the pair headed through alabaster-columned and wood-paneled halls, toward one of the lesser stable complexes. “That’s mostly what the Emperor has now, in the City. Mages that are decadent but dull. They learned the official methods to have power enough, then just stopped there.”

Hakkon looked even more enthused, and even younger, when he replied, “And they don’t have Circles in the City, do they?”

Kordas just grinned back, holding the door open with a flourish for his friend.

For what they needed to inspect, they needed horses. Kordas was certainly not going to take a nursing mare away from her new foal, and he didn’t particularly want to draw attention to the fact that Duke Valdemar was going out for a ride, either. So once outside in the sweet air of Valdemar, he sent the stableboy for two of the Sweetfoot palfreys, a pair of geldings named Penta and Kery, both ordinary-looking bays—or at least, as ordinary as horses in the Valdemar stables ever got.

It was a good morning for riding; the rain had cleared away every hint of dust, flowers were in bloom in all the meadows, and even in the worst of situations, riding a Sweetfoot palfrey was always a pleasure. Kordas liked to boast that you could put a baby in a Sweetfoot’s saddle and it wouldn’t fall off, and he’d come very close to proving that with his insistence that the children of the household learn to ride as soon as they could toddle. So the ride to a peculiar yet nondescript building at the edge of the manor’s grounds brought him a feeling of vast content, even if his mind was still racing.

They dismounted and tied up their horses at rings on the side of the building and went in.

It was a vast storage building, with a workshop attached. And it was here that the other main cash “crop” of the Duchy was produced.

The forests of the Duchy were too valuable to squander as a crop for export. The fields produced mostly hay and grass—every bit of grain stayed right here, and so did the produce. But a clever discovery here had given them something else that was even more valuable to the Empire.

But now Kordas wondered about that discovery, because it seemed so unlikely …

The objects in question were stored on racks that reached all the way to the ceiling and filled the entire storage building. To the uneducated eye, there was absolutely no way of telling what they actually were. They looked like dull, brownish-gray oblongs with flat bottoms, flat tops, pointed ends, and obtusely-angled sides. They were as long as three common wagons and about an arm-length taller than a man.

In fact, they were barge hulls.

Valdemar had been producing them for as long as there had been a Valdemar, after the first Duke—also a mage—had discovered how to create them almost entirely by accident. As much of a botanist as he had been a mage, he had taken to experimenting with fungi he had found here.

And were some of those out of Change-Circles? After listening to the story of the aftermath of the Mage-Wars, it seemed likely! Surely he would have been drawn to Change-Circles, and to investigate them. And I have never heard of a fungus like the one we use to make barge hulls anywhere else.

Well, since the first Duke’s discovery, the Duchy had been making and selling the hulls at such an entirely reasonable price that there were only two other workshops in other parts of the Empire that even bothered with doing the same. Wooden barges were almost unheard of except as luxury items, but these were cheap to produce, requiring a bare minimum of magic.

First, a mold, or bladder, made of inflated rawhide, oiled and carefully prepared, was covered in a layer of cured long-fibered vegetation. This was the only finicky part of the process: layering the vegetation for maximum strength. Here in Valdemar, they used a kind of hemp—the stems, and only the stems—the kind that was generally made into ropes. The stuff would grow anywhere, with wild enthusiasm, and quickly choke out any other crops. They got several cuttings out of every field every growing season. There was a workshop on the eastern coast in Lyranhold that used an equally fibrous seaweed. The third workshop, near the Capital, used a similar weedy relative of flax.

The vegetation was laid on with a simple water-soluble glue, easy and cheap to make. It was allowed to dry, then a thick paste made of water, wheat chaff, sawdust, and any other kind of plant material that could be reduced to a state like coarse-ground wheat was coated on just before the spores of an extremely odd fungus got laid on with a trowel. That was kept damp and allowed to grow until the mold was about a thumb-breadth thick, which took about three days. The workers wore glass-faced hoods, aprons, and gloves, which were thoroughly bleached every day. The fungus spread fast enough that one could watch it grow into intertwining layers, pulling itself tight into a weave that was ultimately fine enough to shine like satin.

Then, an apprentice mage applied a simple, low-power, curative spell of intensely purple light to it, until its surface fused into a single, inflexible piece. It would be tipped onto its longest side, the bladder deflated and pulled out, and there was your hull. Total cost, almost nothing, except for the spellwork, but that was kept a very dear state secret. The result was more waterproof than treated and varnished wood, light enough that two men could carry a hull with ease, tough enough to take hard collisions in the water, easy to patch if it was holed, and it could be made in any shape you liked. On the east coast, they made deeper-drafted, keeled, seagoing boats in addition to barges. In Lyranhold, they were known to make cottage roofs as well. The practical size-limit was right about the length of three wagons; after that they needed some internal ribbing and proper keels to keep from buckling over time, especially in seagoing vessels.

The resulting forms weren’t ideal as roofs, mostly because while they kept out the weather, they did little to keep out the heat of summer nor the cold of winter. In order to be made into barges people could live comfortably in, or into roofs for more than a shepherd’s hut, they needed to be insulated, and that added considerably to the cost. One lesser mage and a crew of helpers could produce as many as four or five plain hulls a day, once the production was started.

They had all sorts of molds here, from rowboats to living barges where entire families could make a comfortable home. Mostly, though, what they produced were cargo barges. The main difference between the cargo barges and the living barges was that no one bothered to cut too many windows into the angled sides of the cargo barges except at the end, where there would be a small cabin for the operator.

There were molded loops at either end. Several barges could be roped together to form a train, and one or two Tow-Beasts hitched to the front loop of the front barge were sufficient to haul the entire thing along, heavily loaded.

It probably never entered the Emperor’s mind, but those three workshops were the main reason commerce flowed so easily and cheaply, if a little slowly, within the Empire. While Imperial roads were good, the network of canals was excellent. There were Gates at intervals along every canal as well as locks to lift the barges over elevation changes. Generally, anything that needed transportation went by barge for all but the last few leagues, or within a large city.

Anyone in the Duchy could come here and get a hull for the very special cost of about the price of two goats. Newlyweds got one free. Anyone outside the Duchy paid more than that, of course; this was a “cash crop.” In a pinch they could be used as houses on land as well as on the canals, but because they were so light, they were dangerous in a windstorm unless heavily weighted with a layer of paving stones in the bottom.

“How many of these things are there in the Duchy, do you think?” Kordas asked Hakkon.