Michael Manning - The God-Stone War

For a second, his rebuttal struck my funny bone and I laughed. “Now you have me wondering at the wisdom of all my past choices.”

He smiled. “You’re the biggest fool I’ve ever known, aside from myself. I know you would do anything to fix this, but I’m still not going to let you experiment on me.”

“Why?”

“You remember our promise?” he asked suddenly.

I knew exactly what he was referring to… a promise I had forced him to make with me years ago, when he was first struggling to deal with the loss of his goddess. I had made him swear never to take his own life, unless he enlisted my aid. “I thought perhaps you were past that. What about Marissa?”

His face hardened when I mentioned his wife. “I love her Mort. More now than ever, but I can’t change this. The pain is still there. I’ve struggled with it every day, and if it weren’t for her, I doubt I would have made it this far.”

“She’ll be devastated without you.”

“She deserves better than I can give her. I can’t even give her children.”

Something clicked into place as he said that. “That’s why you’re moving to Agraden, her family is there,” I observed.

“She’ll need them,” he said, “afterward… She’s still young Mordecai. She can still have children if she doesn’t wait too long.”

I glared at him while tears formed in my eyes. “Perhaps you should ask her that. I suspect she’d have a few opinions on that topic you might want to consider! In fact, maybe I should ask her myself.”

Marc didn’t bother trying to stop me, for I never rose from my seat. He simply said, “Don’t.”

I growled at him from between clenched teeth, an inarticulate sound without words, a mixture of tears and frustration.

He stood and crossed over to stand before me. “You promised to help, no matter what I chose. You can’t stop this, so help me make this easier for her.”

I rose and hugged him, hard, and then I answered, “What do you need me to do? It sounds as if you’ve already got everything figured out.”

“When the girls come back, they’ll want to know why you’re crying. We’ll tell them we spoke about your father. Later I want you to support my decision to move to Agraden… for research into the Gaelyn family. I’ll also need your help with finances. Relocating probably won’t be cheap,” he told me softly.

I pushed him away. “I’ll help you with the finances, but I haven’t given up hope yet.”

He laughed, remembering the joke he and Dorian had made of Penny and me years ago, and then he hugged me again. “You’ve already been a better friend than I ever deserved. Let me do this my way,” he answered in a voice thick with sorrow.

Penny returned after a few minutes, but I had dry eyes by then, so we didn’t have to resort to Marc’s excuse. That was probably a good thing… I’d never had much luck lying to Penny.

The next day I planned to check on the work at the World Road. Most of my work on the actual project was already completed. The runes for the great gates had all been carefully laid and etched into the stone, but I still needed to make sure that the rest of the design was completed properly, before the enchantments could be activated. My best estimate was that the massive construction project would take another year or two to complete all the stonework involved in the design.

Most of that stonework had little to do with the magic itself, but was purely for control and defense purposes. Once the gates had been activated, the World Road would connect even the farthest portions of Lothion, allowing farmers and merchants to get from any part of the nation to its capital, with no more than a couple of days travel at most. It would also allow the king to move troops rapidly to any place in the kingdom that might be threatened.

The World Road itself was actually being built underground in a shape similar to a wagon wheel. The hub at its center was the fortress that the Traveler’s Pinnacle was built upon. Circling that fortress was the main road itself, with a circumference of nearly a mile and two thirds. The road bed was built upon dressed stone laid some fifty feet below the surface. To create it, we had excavated a massive trench before laying the base of the road directly upon the bedrock and building the walls of dressed stone. The ceiling was built of massive monoliths that stretched twenty foot across, from one side to the next.

Once it was completed, the entire thing would be covered over again with earth. Hopefully, there would be little sign above ground of where the actual road lay, aside from the fortress at its center. There were two roads that led from either side of the circle to enter the fortress itself, and massive iron portcullises and oaken gates protected the entry ways to it. More portcullises subdivided the road after it entered the fortress. Several others were planned along the main outer road as well, to control the traffic there if an invader ever sought to use it to invade Lothion.

Along the outer circumference of the World Road, were the magical gates that everything else had been built to protect and manage. Each of these massive gates would, when finished, permanently connect to a similar gate near the various cities of Lothion. Those gate destinations would each be protected by a modest fortress, not to mention the other more basic ‘structural’ defenses I had built into the design.

More interesting, to my mind at least, were the wider possibilities. The structure we were building had room for twenty three gates eventually, but only seven had been designated for locations in Lothion. Someday, given stable enough political and economic conditions, we might open gates to key locations within other nations, such as Gododdin or Dunbar, or possibly even to small city-states like Agraden.

Having seen the effects of easier trade and transportation upon Washbrook and the Cameron lands, I could only imagine what the implications of a larger system of full time gateways might be. My hope and dream was that it would prove to be one of the greatest boons to the economy of, not just Lothion, but all nations. The world of men had been a place of wonders before the Sundering. A world of prosperity, one in which magic was common, and many of the ills of the present were easily handled. The World Road would be a grand step to returning mankind to those days.

Today was almost my first day with George, Walter Prathion’s son, as my miellte. At eighteen years of age, he was a tall young man with a slender build and light brown hair. Over the past few years I had spent some amount of time helping him to learn the careful use of his abilities, but I still had my doubts about whether he would be very useful as a miellte. The task required patience and observation… in spite of the fact that it was incredibly boring. Even I could admit that. Following me around all day and keeping an eye on my mental state was a tedious job for anyone. Hell, I didn’t even like trying to keep up with my mental state.

Though I hated to admit it, that was one thing about Elaine that made her better suited for the job. Her infatuation with me made it much easier to spend a large portion of her time watching my mental condition. Even so, George was a quiet lad and he hadn’t shown too much in the way of youthful recklessness yet. I was quite sure that in his place, and at his age, I would have been a poor fit for the job.

George was trying to inconspicuously pick his nose when I spoke to get his attention. “George, are you sure you want to spend all day following me around?”

He glanced up before answering, with a face almost devoid of expression, “Nope.”

His honesty caught me off guard. The boy had a combination of frank honesty and sarcasm that, when mixed together, often left people puzzled. I didn’t mind though. I had been an arrogant young man myself once. Most would say I wasn’t too far from it even now. “Glad to hear it,” I responded with a grin. “I feel much the same way.”