Chapter 57 - Barefoot King

“I cannot believe you aren’t wearing shoes! The ground is still frozen for Aresk’s sake!” Fay grumbled good naturedly as we walked from Mondit to the pass hand in hand. I paused and stamped a foot, leaving an inch deep imprint in the frozen earth, and then raised it to show her my sole.

“Foot beats stone now!” I grinned. “You wouldn’t believe how happy I was to finally have shoes after I first got here! They weren’t even shoes, just cloth and hide wrapped around my feet. I need to be in contact with the ground to use one of my new abilities so-”

“Barefoot King!” she snorted. “It’s hardly an impressive sight, Ray.”

“You’ll see the benefits soon, love. How’s your coven doing?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.

“Trinket production is steady, about sixty a day for single cast items, but it doesn’t leave us any mana to learn to use our new powers, Husband. Some more Souls would be helpful.” Fay was now almost as avaricious for Souls as Kril had become. When she called me “Husband” I knew she was being deadly serious.

“It’s at the top of my list! It’s why-”

“Going north on your own in winter, without shoes no less, is crazy. You should take guards and hunters to process the meat,” she interrupted me. “I could come along as well!” We’d been low-key arguing about this for two days now, since I told her my plans.

“It’s almost spring… I’ll put the loot in my storage space! You know I can outrun the cavalry now. They’d only slow me down,” I gently repeated once again.

“And what about me? Weeks on my own, no one to warm my bed for me!” She rested her free hand across her gently curving stomach. You had to pay attention but the growing bulge was just starting to show. It made me a little uncomfortable. I didn’t have to worry about my more violent tendencies and professional inclination in this world. Hell, here they were viewed as bloody advantages! But I felt vulnerable when I rested my palm on Fay’s stomach in a way I’d never felt back on Earth where I was usually only a single slip away from blowing my cover.

“It won’t be that long.” I tried to reassure her. “Ten days, tops. I’ve got Glimpse to scout for me and the tusks and meat will just go in my storage space.” I didn’t mention my other idea. Neither Kril nor my wife would appreciate what I was considering. Fay continued to grumble but the fight had gone out of her and a resigned annoyance settled in.

We reached the pass and stepped aside as a slow moving wagon rumbled past carrying finished steel products, arrow heads, spear tips and the new helmets I’d asked Klip to produce, back towards Mondit.

The Palliat Pass was now thoroughly changed. The western side was lined with crude smelters being serviced by dozens of apprentices. They were mostly from the prisoners - slaves I supposed - but more and more of the warriors who hadn’t made the cut for the horse archers or lancers had made approaches to Klip, looking to learn the smithing arts.

The eastern side was composed of streams of people pulling handcarts in and out of the small entrances to the previously excavated tunnels. They dumped their loads by the smelters and went back for more, weaving between each other. Whoever had been here before, however long ago it was, had created a huge network of winding tunnels and artificial caverns below the surface. I suspected most of the hills around us would look like Swiss cheese if I had access to LIDAR. My people had currently only explored a fraction of the old tunnel system.

I paced the width of the mouth of the pass a couple of times, Fay watching bemusedly, then made a couple of cuts into the stone with my dagger. I sliced a pair of neat lines into the stone that were about three metres apart and roughly in the middle of the opening.

“Klip!” I called loud enough to be heard over the smashing of hammers and the hiss of molten metal being poured out. A minute later the blacksmith walked over to me, head held high.

“Lord,” he greeted me.

“I need to stop the traffic through the pass for a few minutes. I’m going to build you some walls,” I told him. He twitched and looked at the thirty metre wide entrance to the pass for a moment then shrugged and nodded.

“Oi! Keep the stock on the loading spot for now!” he yelled back towards his open air workshop. A chorus of surly replies and waving hands came back to him. I grinned at Fay who was looking at me with a raised eyebrow.

“This is why I’m not wearing shoes.”

After striding over to the cliff wall I spent a hundred mana, and my perception flowed out into the ground below me. It began with a radius of about a metre but for the first five seconds that spread out until it was ten metres in either direction. As soon as I cast I bent my will and began moving the stone around me.

I rose up on a column of rock and soil that solidified into a pillar three metres tall and half a metre wide. I flowed across the mouth of the canyon leaving a wall of solid stone behind me. When I got to where I’d cut my first mark I stopped, the fifteen second timer on the power having elapsed.

Moving by mentally controlling the muck around you to push your feet along felt a bit like ice skating. I glided rather than walked and at a much quicker speed than I could manage with my legs. I could also condense or expand the material for as long as it was within my sphere of influence.

Rather than create styrofoam-rock walls I’d pulled the materials from the south side of the of the wall in, creating a wide shallow trench that attackers would have to cross and increasing the effective height of the wall to outsiders. I wanted this place to be as secure as possible before I went north. Of all my little satellite settlements this one could not be lost.

I glanced down with a broad grin on my face then stared dumbstruck as Fay leapt upwards. Her enhanced body made leaping a metre and a half vertically simple enough but as she reached the peak of her jump a disc of ice appeared under and she launched herself off it. At the second peak she summoned another Ice shield then stepped daintily onto the top of my new wall like she was strolling out in the steppe.

“It’s high up here.” She looked south over the steppe towards Mondit and the well worn tracks leading to our little town. “Is this what it’s like looking down from Glimpse’s eyes?” The crow cawed loudly from where he circled above us.

“Not even close I’m afraid!” I spent another hundred mana as I leapt down to the other mark I’d cut into the floor of the pass. I repeated the procedure then passed through the little town to the north and built walls to seal that end of the pass as well.

When I got back Klip was still in awe, smacking his fist gently against the first wall I’d built.

“You could be a rich man. Mining's dangerous, making the rock flow away with a thought would let you beat out all the competition. Is this… Lord, I’ve been down into the tunnels. There’s no supporting beams and the walls are smooth. Did someone like you make this place?”

“I think so. I don’t know how long ago or who they were but there are signs beyond the sculpted walls that it was someone, or a number of people maybe, like me.” Kilp stared up at the sheer cliffs that had penned him in for months with a look that bordered on reverence. I stuck out my hand in the traditional warriors clasp. Even the shit-sitters recognised the correct form after so long among us and he stuck his arm out and gripped my wrist. When did the nomads become my people? I couldn’t point to any particular event except maybe my marriage to Fay. She landed next to me, perhaps having grown bored of the view to the south while I reinforced the north.

I spent a whopping two Souls on Soul Transfer in order to hopefully give Klip a single Soul and awaken his first affinity. It didn’t work because that would have been too easy. I tried again, going up through the numbers in steps until it clicked. He had been starting to look a little uncomfortable as I failed to release his arm but then his eyes went wide and he snatched his hand back to swat at the air.

“Crathan? Why the fuck is it in Crathan? What the hell are affinities?” he gasped.

“Affinities are the types of magic. Normally I’d say pick Life but you being you… Fire might be a better fit!” I grinned at him. “You can boost your spells a little or get a level and improve your stats.” He was completely F tier at the moment.

“Why me? You know I’ll leave when my time is done!” he wondered as he continued swatting at the words floating in his vision.

“There’s a cost,” I replied ominously.

“What?” he demanded in a panicked squeak , a far cry from his usual brash baritone.

“Among the nomads the women are the crafters while the men are herding and hunting. Or at war. Look at the women for new apprentices.”

“But Velkit-”

“I think it’s a good idea,” Fay interrupted. “I’ve got a few strong ladies I’d like to present to you, master smith.” His eyes flicked between us and an look of resignation crept into his gaze.

“Why’d you give me the Souls?” he asked.

“I wanted to establish how few Souls I had to transfer to give-”

“What? That’s insane! We need to concentrate the Souls we have, Ray!” Fay stomped her foot and a circle of dust spread out from the impact.

“I’m not going to be able to get enough to seriously level more than one or two people until after our next battle. If we get to that fight and all our warriors had access to the Life affinity, even just the weakest spells, it will go better for us. The coven and Kril could stop churning out healing charms and focus on shields and attack magic!” I answered quickly. Marriage was never an easy thing but when your wife could break rocks with her bare hands and was riding the hormones of pregnancy? That took it to a whole new level. Fay was remarkably understanding but her temper had been flaring a lot more over the last few weeks than was usual.

“How many?” she asked, suddenly calm again.

“Twenty. I have to transfer enough to give someone a single level. This is huge! It means that for - ” I paused and tried to do the numbers in my head and quickly gave up, “ - two thousand Souls I can get a hundred warriors able to self heal and give them a minor boost to their strength! Can you imagine a hundred warriors who just shrug off minor wounds and survive serious injuries? We’ve got four hundred warriors training in the new squadrons. Eight thousand Souls to make them all like us? We’d be unstoppable!” I enthused. I might have been laying it on a little thick but the idea had been eating at the back of my mind for days.

“They’ll be weak compared to us… although compared to people without that advantage? Hmm. For the same amount you could make two people as strong as me or the Fangs. But… I can see your perspective. It would make us a lot more formidable, collectively. I’ll agree on one condition: when they’re available I want more Souls for the women.” She crossed her arms and fixed me with a glare.

The coven hadn’t gone down entirely well with the wider tribe. Women were respected - borderline sacred - despite the fact they couldn’t technically own anything. It was ironic that they were so important but had so few rights. Seeing women snap spear shafts in their hands had upset some of the chaps, to put it mildly.

I wasn’t on a crusade to bring equality to this world. I wasn’t even sure what my crusade was at the moment. Poseidon still sat at the top of my shit list, and I fully intended to kill her if I could, but the longer I’d been here the more tied to this world I had become. My lists had gotten rather muddled, they were now almost entirely focussed on the wellbeing and strength of my adoptive tribe. Partially out of self interest but increasingly there was something else motivating me as well. It was mostly with a view to taking down Mortimer and then the others of course but… even in my head that argument had started to feel hollow.

“The men are all a little worried about the fact that you keep snapping inch thick poles of wood when you get cross,” I began, praying desperately I wasn’t stepping on a landmine. “They’ll come around in time and I’m more than happy to give the women Souls as well. This summer is going to see a lot fighting whatever I do. I’d rather get the other tribes to join us but some of them are going to fight us. Whatever I do for the warriors I’ll do the same for the women, eventually.” This might annoy some of the warriors but I was, somewhat embarrassingly, viewed as something of a demi-god to a lot of them. I had the social capital to burn on keeping Fay happy and it was kind of the right thing to do anyway.

“How long until you go?” Fay asked as Klip wandered off, happily staring at screens that no one else could see.

“I’m going now, love,” I said softly, pulling her into an embrace and moving for a kiss. She allowed the hug but she pulled her face back.

“No. You get that when you come home. Be careful, Ray. The Ur-viles…” she whispered in my ear as she moved to lay her cheek against mine.

“Won’t know what hit them,” I said with a savage smile. I kissed her ear and stepped back. “Kril needs to keep focussing on his project. If he skulks back into Mondit tell him Glimpse is keeping an eye on him!” I said light heartedly. My crow would be watching my back and looking for my prey but Kril might not know that.

“He’ll know that’s a lie. If I see him I’ll make sure he gets back to work,” she said. “Safe travels, love. Hurry back.” Without another word she turned and walked back towards Mondit. I looked around me and smiled. The mine was doing well, Mondit was rich and thriving. My army was constantly training under the Fangs or Trikilo and the side project I’d foisted on Kril was coming together nicely.

I sighed as Fay moved into the distance. I was getting soft. I looked to the north and felt a sense of freedom. The tribe would be fine without me for a couple of weeks: it was time to go hunting.