Commander Teasdale In the Dragonlands, page 29
"The resistance in Nasine is growing and they are starting to use the new rifles."
Paulette was trapped. She knew Marie. Marie was totally committed to the revolution. She knew where the bodies were buried and she had agents all over Parise and the rest of Centriaum, worse she would readily sacrifice Paulette to the needs of the revolution. Paulette had known that from the beginning and she had accepted it because she believed in the revolution too.
She still believed in the revolution in theory, in practice she wasn't sure anymore.
Chapter 21: Trades
Location: HMS Duke Aragorn, Singi Harbor
Time: 6:25 AM, 6 Wovoro, 1273
Tensy climbed down the netting to the dinghy. They were in a bay off a small city on the west coast of the Dragonlands. This was the farthest south along the coast of the Dragonlands that they had reached. Her mission was twofold: first was to inform the locals of the College of Magic at Drakar and second to try and reach basic trade agreements for the Kingdom Isles.
Trade as well as treaties was why they were here. By now the possibility of a Dragon coming to the aid of the Kingdom Isles against the Empire of Parise, the way the Dragon Pen came to Arthur's aid against the Dwarven Empire back in prehistory, was gone. But the Lords of the Admiralty still had her sitting on the other side of the world.
Tensy settled into her seat in the dinghy and the petty officer pulled the lever that started the engine turning. It was a steam engine with a boiler fabricated in George's Townhouse in Drakar. The engine started chugging and the dinghy moved out smartly. While Tensy and Sou Chi watched the shore. Sou Chi was from the lands claimed by Glorious Golden Sunrise of the East. He was a merchant but for this he was acting as an agent and translator for Drakar and the College of Magic.
HMS Duke Aragorn was acting as transport for the delegation, at the same time she was mapping the coast of the Dragonlands.
Tensy watched the city with See Magic. There was magic here, lots of minor magic, that had the feel of dragon magic. By now, Tensy could tell the difference. She knew what had happened. The dragons still had urges even as they aged. They, especially the males, would take the form of humans and seduce a local. Dragons it turned out felt little in the way of social restraint and internalized almost none. Over the generations most of the Draguese had one or two things that they just magically did. They mostly had limited control and only one or two things that they could do. Those Kai as they called them might affect their job or might not. Someone who could make things hot magically was likely to become a baker, a smith, or some other profession that required heat. Someone who could push or pull things magically might run a rickshaw or a boat. Someone with a green thumb might become a gardener. That sort of thing.
This city was full of that. Skiffs moved across the bay without oars or sails. There were the smells of cooking, but much less wood smoke than Tensy would have expected in Londinium, and most of the people had a hint of magic about them.
They reached a dock and Tensy, Sou Chi, and three marines climbed to the wharf.
Sou Chi led them through the winding streets to a large building with a covered walkway around it. They went up the steps, and Sou Chi had them remove their shoes before entering the apartment of Din Kia, a merchant he knew.
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Dinner had been served and eaten. They were now on a strong tea. Discussion had turned to the royal house of Singi.
Din Kia sipped his tea then said. "Singi fathered another half-dragon on the royal house."
"It lived then?" Sou Chi asked.
They were speaking Trade Dragonese. There were hundreds of languages in the Dragon Lands but Trade Dragonese was spoken by the merchants and diplomats throughout the Dragon Lands and into the Godsland on the southern half of the continent. By now, Tensy was competent enough to follow conversations, though she was informed that her accent was atrocious. Risking her accent she asked. "Lived?"
"When a dragon sires a child," Din Kia explained, "whether on a human, an elephant, a horse, or some other animal, the get is often deformed. Sometimes they come out as eggs, that's easiest on the mother. The eggs are usually soft when laid and not much larger than a normal baby. But those are less likely to be hatched. Mostly because the parent doesn't know what to do with it. The dragon doesn't care but of course most noble houses in the dragon-lands base their nobility on the amount of dragon-blood in their line, so among humans every effort is made to preserve the dragon child."
"Nobles being nobles, they spread the dragon blood to the gentry and the peasants." Sou Chi said. "I have three dragons in my known ancestry."
Sou Chi traced his ancestry back some seven generations.
"Noble houses often have a dragon no more than three or four generations back. The additional status is well worth the occasional stillbirth or deformed half-dragon. Of course later generations don't have defects nearly as often. But the magic gets weaker and less flexible."
"That's always bothered me," Tensy admitted. "Weaker I understand but less flexible? When elves have less magic it's less powerful but no less flexible.
"Dragon brains are different." Sou Chi told her. He sipped his tea then went on. "A young dragon isn't just uninformed like a human child, it's actually limited the way an animal is. It's brain doesn't have the capability to reason the way a human, even a human baby can. It's a big lizard as smart and as limited as an alligator. What it does it does through instinct not calculation. That goes for magic too. A young dragon uses its magic to do basic things that its nature allows like breathing fire or becoming light enough to fly, even with its small wings. Even an elder dragon like Glorious Golden Sunrise of the East does magic more by instinct than by skill or calculation. That was why he needed the spell Specialized Brain Region for Amulet Wizardry. Because even an elder dragon doesn't build a spell. Not even as much as an elf does. Much less a human book wizard like you Tensy. "
"What about Primus?" Tensy asked. Primus was the first student at the college of magic at Drakar. He had learned to speak kingdom and was learning magic. At fifty he shouldn't have the brains for either.
"Primus may be unique among dragons." Sou Chi said. The Magic school at Drakar now had almost fifty students, all but two of them human. The two dragon students were Primus and Glorious Golden Sunrise of the East. Glorious Golden Sunrise of the East was still working his way through the basic magic processes to learn to craft a Wizard's Townhouse. Primus was learning in a more rounded manner, more like an elven natural wizard. He was learning magic but he was also learning to read and to craft spells, even things like how a windmill worked.
Sou Chi and Din Kia talked about Primus and how he was learning magic as Sou Chi filled Din Kia in on the university and the dragons.
"You think he's part human?" Din Kia asked.
"It could be," Sou Chi agreed, "occasionally a female dragon will have her way with a human or a tiger. If one went back to dragon form and laid a clutch of eggs. Especially if the sire was a half dragon."
"Or just laid a single egg." Tensy offered. "After all, I assume that laying a single egg is easier than laying a clutch of them."
"No," Din Kia said, "it's happened before, dragons always lay clutches no matter what the sire is."
Which only made sense. The number of eggs would be controlled by the mother, not the father.
Din Kia continued, "I think we can agree that your Primus is an exception, whatever his ancestry. Most dragons are born only able to do one bit of magic and they do that instinctively, like a cat baring its claws. It's not till later, when other parts of their brains develop, that the flexibility of their magic increases. But a human brain isn't like a dragon brain. It doesn't change all that much even in childhood. So we're born able to do one bit of magic that we do naturally and most of us never develop a second. I think your way is better. I have always been able to make myself lighter, not light enough to float but I could jump to a roof top as a child. I still could if I were so foolish. But I can't create a servant spell."
"You could, you know." Tensy countered. "Buy an amulet of servant and load it. You can have magic as flexible as mine, in addition to your natural talent. You could attend the college of wizardry at Drakar and learn to craft and cast your own spells, or if you don't have the time to take away from your business, you could send your daughters. They could return in a few years able to do more flexible magic in addition to whatever talent they were born with."
They finished dinner. Din Kia showed interest but made no promises. They spent three days in Singi talking to other merchants, then went on. While Tensy tried to put aside her concerns about what was happening back in the kingdom.
Location: The Boar's Head, Londinium
Time: 8:53 PM, 6 Wovoro, 1273
Colonel of Marines Roger Danworth looked down at the body. Marquis Durand wasn't going to be saying anything to anyone but Coganie. He had apparently arrived in the goddess of deaths' hall two days ago. No one had entered his private rooms since. Rigor had mostly passed but the stink of decomposition had barely started. Roger noted that Durand hadn't had a pleasant time in the last hours of his life. He had apparently been persuaded to reveal all. The rooms had been ransacked, the hidden caches opened and emptied but less damage than there would have been if they were searching blind.
They questioned the Boar's Head staff. Who mostly wanted to know who would be running the tavern now. As for Durand's less savoury employees, the enforcers and leg breakers who had worked for him. The power struggle to take control of his business would be starting as soon as word leaked that Durand and Big Mike were no longer in the picture.
Roger left cleanup in the charge of Sergeant Wainwright and left to report. At least this leak was plugged.
It didn't occur to him what the phone meant. There was no reason it should. He didn't own a phone, for that matter he'd never heard of phones, switchboards or dongles.
Location: Royal Palace, Ifle
Time: 8:35 AM, 28 Coganie, 1273
Rosalvo Corbin had made several phones. They weren't quite the same as the phones made to Peter Banyon's designs, at least, the spells were a bit different. The phones had speakers and microphones. The speaker on one end and the microphone on the other. They had a dongle in the middle. After they were made they were loaded with a phone spell that Rosalvo had worked out and tested to be sure it worked. Then stuck in a spell safe. Rosalvo didn't know how long they needed to be aged to work. In fact the only way he knew how to find out was to make a bunch of them and test them starting after his guess about the earliest time they would be ready. Then see how well they worked, how easy they were to load and how long they held a loaded spell before it dissipated. It was wasteful of magical items but it was the only way he knew to do it.
He had started testing phones four months after he'd made them and loaded them. It was now seven months and this time the phone had lasted a week after it was loaded and the phone operated for up to four hours. You could turn it off and on and if you loaded the Phone Spell into two of them and exchanged dongles they could talk to each other across Ifle from each other.
He had come up with something else a month after the first phone he wasn't sure if it would work.
He had developed a dongle stick. It had five slots each of which had a dongle. You took out its dongles and replaced them with the phone's dongles.
Location: Tregon Park, Kingdom Isles
Time: 11:33 AM, 29 Coganie, 1273
Peter traced a circuit. It wasn't electronics, it was a combination of magic, circuitry diagrams and logical symbology. Magic wasn't quite like science, drawing a symbol of a resistor produced resistance. Drawing a Nand Gate produced a nand output, an Xor gate produced an xor output. But that didn't mean that an integrated circuit was simple or easy. There were eight bits in a byte. At least in the system Peter was using. So to do a one byte adder Peter needed eight one bit adder circuits linked together in the proper way. To do more than make a simple adding machine he needed mathematical and logic circuits. In the Townhouses they had used the magic of the townhouses and Chip's wooden brains.
As part of Chip's natural necromancy he created a sort of pseudo mental structure based on neural nets to run the golems and other magical constructs he made. He didn't control the process consciously he just willed the wooden golems to have certain abilities and they did. Integrating that with Peter's logic circuits hadn't been easy.
Peter wasn't a computer engineer, or even an electrical engineer, he was a mechanical engineer. His job was making sure the water jets in a dishwasher would spray the water at the dishes at the right force and angle to wash away the crud on the dishes. Almost more than his knowledge of mechanical engineering, his knowledge about working together in a research and development shop was what had produced the results he'd achieved.
For the symbols that Peter was using weren't the symbols that he would have used in a computer logic class before the Merge. They had been worked out right here by a team of humans, elves, orcs, and other beings. Peter had remembered And, Or, Nand, Nor, Xor, and Not. After he'd thought about it he'd remembered that a Nand was a Not after an And and a few other bits and pieces, but the actual structures they were working with now had been developed by the team.
They were working on modules that were to act as switchers for a peer to peer network. That meant each device would have to have at least two dongles to connect to at least two other devices. The phone, or screen, or other device, would have to be able to determine which device was to receive the signal and how it was to get where it was ultimately going.
If the device only had two dongles and it knew if the signal was coming from one of them then all it had to determine was whether the signal was for it or not. If it wasn't for it, it had to be for a device farther down the chain.
Except it wasn't that simple. What if one of the devices didn't happen to be active at the moment. That meant all the devices after it in the chain were cut off. If you didn't want the network constantly going down you needed there to be at least three dongles on each device and that meant each device needed to be able to sort the signals. Figure out which dongle would connect to the device that the signal was meant for.
Peer to peer systems turned out to be really hard. Server and client systems were easier, but to use the one server they had, meant a trip to the other side of the world to put a dongle into the device in George's townhouse. Peter had made other servers like the one Kaggluk had aged but they weren't properly aged, certainly not aged enough to stay on continuously. They were also not the infinitely deep recursive system that the one in Drakar was.
That effectively limited the phone system to people who knew someone who could take their dongles to Drakar. That someone was Grandmaster Elbert John Corninth, and—at the moment, no one else. At least no one else in the Kingdom Isles or the Orclands, no one in Amonria, no one in the spice islands, no one in Centriaum. His Majesty had a phone. As did several of his councilors, high ranking navy officers and members of the KOTC Board, some people in the Orclands mostly located on Research Island. Peter didn't have a count but he would be surprised if there were more than two hundred working phones in the system. Not counting the devices that were part of Tensy's Townhouse
That had to change. There needed to be a peer to peer network that people could access just by having a phone. Or at the very least several network hubs that were interconnected. That was a possibility if there were a network hub that would stay up, but no, if it was set up here in the Kingdom Isles parliament would pass laws requiring the server to report on the actions of anyone using the phones. "A necessary measure in this time of war."
Parliament was already sitting on the press and the sedition laws were broad enough and severe enough so that you could end up in the dock, for no more than getting on the wrong side of a prosecutor, or someone with the ear of a prosecutor.
He needed someone to age some of the other servers and he needed those servers to be handled in such a way that even the owner of the server couldn't listen in on phone calls.
He collected up a couple of the servers and called Elbert. He needed to go to Research Island, he needed to talk to Kaggluk and to Hilda Kruger.
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Grandmaster of Wizardry, Captain Elbert John Corninth was busy. He had found himself immersed in the magical needs of the KOTC and the Orclands. First dealing with the orcs of Research Island then with the orcs of the coastal tribes. With Peter's example and in part the example of the Rifles he had mostly put away the stereotype of orcish stupidity. Partly that was because Elbert thought he was smart enough, so that everyone was pretty stupid compared to him. He didn't find the notion of a smart orc to be in any way threatening. They still wouldn't be as smart as he was but they might be smart enough to be worth talking to.
Research Island was proving to be a magnet for intelligent and curious orcs. He had five apprentices now, all of them orcs and all of them as bright as Tensy Teasdale who in turn had been the brightest apprentice he'd had in decades.
That was what he was doing now. Teaching his apprentices about Directed Steam Flow, a new spell that he had developed based on the steam pipes that were part of Peter's boiler system for powering steam turbines. Elbert's engineering bent had been there before he'd ever met Sir Peter Banyon, Knight of the Table Round. That was why he had developed the Wizard's Townhouse to the extent he had. The difficulty was in producing an inlay material that would not be destroyed by the heat of the fire box.
He didn't appreciate his thoughts being interrupted by a phone call.
"Yes Peter what is it?"
The students didn't hear Sir Peter's answer.
