option, assuming such things even exist. Sucking the residual mana out of the
house would work, but that wouldn’t help once we left and I was hoping for a
more permanent solution. Besides, given the state of the building I was afraid it
would collapse if I depleted whatever structural reinforcement was still
active.
One of my favorite abusive spell research ideas in pen-and-paper RPGs
was always tapping the kinetic energy of the Earth’s rotation to generate mana.
No luck with that here. Which wasn’t surprising, actually - it was hard to make
that work in a way that didn’t violate conservation of angular momentum.
Hmm.
Of course, the idea that finally worked was no less mind-boggling. Mana
is a form of energy, if an exotic one. Matter and energy are different forms of
the same thing. Transforming matter into mana required a very complex spell
with high energy requirements, and it wasn’t especially fast. But by the time I
thought of it I’d recovered enough to pull it off, using the mass of my little
amulet as the source of matter.
How much energy? E=mc^2, baby. The flow rate wasn’t especially high,
but my little amulet would provide a steady supply of energy for centuries
before it ate itself.
Figuring out how to lock the spell down as a permanent enchantment took
another hour or so, and I eventually had to punt and use my instinctive ability to
control my own magic to handle turning it on and off as needed. The meta-
magic aspect of my mana element was enough of a grounding that I was sure I
could work out a proper way of embedding on/off controls in an enchantment,
but I’d probably need an afternoon of trial and effort to get there. No time for
that now, obviously.
Avilla came out with a set of clothes for me while I was working, and
waited with a faint smile while I awkwardly dressed myself. No zippers or
Velcro, of course, just lots of buttons in odd places. But that was fine. I just
21
counted myself lucky she was offering pants and a shirt instead of a toga or kilt
or something.
Then I got to the shoes, and frowned as a though occurred to me.
“You just happened to have shoes in my size lying around?”
“Of course not, Daniel. I adjusted them. I may not be much use in a fight,
but I’m good at domestic magic. Did I get the size right?”
I tried them on, and wriggled my toes. “Yeah, looks like it. That’s pretty
slick.”
She smiled prettily at the compliment, and I had to remind myself she was
taken. And probably a lesbian, unless her joke earlier was meant as an offer.
Damn, but she was cute.
She went back inside to pack, and I shook my head. Hadn’t I had enough
woman troubles for one week? Focus on not dying.
It took the witches hours to get ready to leave, but the reasons why went a
long way towards reassuring me that they were just a couple of young women
with unusual abilities rather than some kind of monster in disguise. They
washed up and changed and fixed their hair first, and spent a good while
fussing over each other and debating what they should wear. When they finally
got down to packing they spent forever agonizing over what to take and what to
leave, and it was pretty obvious to me that neither of them had ever done
something like this before.
I didn’t want to leave until dawn anyway, so I didn’t worry about it. The
time they spent dithering was just more time I could spend getting ready.
Once my amulet was finished I spent some time pacing and thinking,
while I got used to the feel of drawing energy from it. My personal supply of
magic worked more like physical fatigue than the mana bar in a computer
game, and I got the feeling I could damage myself if I tried to use too much
magic to quickly. The fight with the troll had been pushing my limits, and it
might take a day or two to completely recover from that.
But my artificial power source was more like a machine. It could feed me
energy forever, and drawing on it let me work magic without tiring myself.
There was still some mental fatigue involved in channeling the energy, but I
could go for hours before that started to get to me. So what was the next most
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important problem we were going to face that I could fix with magic?
Well, that was obvious.
Enchanting a cloak to shed warmth was far less complicated than my
mana exploit, but my understanding of fire magic was a lot weaker. It took
quite a bit of experimentation to get the right intensity to make the garment
comfortably warm without being too hot, and by then the first light of dawn
was starting to creep in through the hole in the wall.
The girls came trooping down the stairs at that point with a rather
ambitious-looking pile of belongings. A bulging pack for each of them, of an
odd design that didn’t look terribly comfortable to my eye. A short pole with
several sacks hung from it, which I guessed they meant to carry between them.
Another, larger pack that Avilla set down in front of me.
“Can you check the weight on that?” She asked reasonably. “I’m trying to
save as many of granny’s implements as I can, but I wasn’t sure how much you
can carry.”
I picked it up, and mentally revised my estimate of the girl’s strength. It
had to weigh sixty pounds, and she’d carried it over in one hand with no
obvious effort. Avilla was a bit more solidly built than Cerise, but she was
more statuesque than amazonian. There was no way she had enough muscle to
pull that off naturally, so it had to be some kind of magic.
I hefted the pack for a moment, and slung it on my back. Ouch.
“That’s going to get heavy after a few miles of road. I take it you were
hoping to load me up with more?”
She bit her lip, and nodded uncertainly. I sighed.
“Look, Avilla, I know it’s hard to leave things behind. But we can’t
weigh ourselves down too much or it’ll get us killed. For all we know we
could run into an army of trolls a mile down the road. How fast do you think
you and Cerise are going to be able to run carrying all that?”
I nodded at the pile they’d accumulated on the kitchen table.
“Um... not very fast?” She looked crestfallen. “I’m sorry, Daniel. It’s just,
I’m a hearth witch. I’m almost powerless once I step past my threshold, and if I
can’t even cook and sew properly what use am I?”
23
Well, that was a fair point. But I was trying to encourage her here, not
make her even more worried.
“You’ll have a home again someday, Avilla. But we have to keep you in
one piece until we find a place to rebuild. Tell you what. Make a pile of the
things you can’t bear to lose that are too heavy to carry easily, and I’ll seal
them up in a stone vault under the house. That way the goblins won’t find them,
and we can come back for them someday.
Her face lit up like she’d just gotten a stay of execution. “Really? You
mean it? Thank you, Daniel!”
She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me. Then she spun and ran
back into the kitchen, babbling excitedly to Cerise about reorganizing the bags.
I just stood there stunned.
Wow, that girl could kiss. Her lips tasted of honey and cinnamon, and that
wasn’t poetic license. It must be some kind of magic, but whatever it was it