Mageborn The Line of Illeniel, Michael Manning [best ebook reader for laptop txt] 📗

it was already fifteen feet deep and stretched from one side of the narrow entrance to Shepherd’s Rest to the other.

“I can’t keep building up,” Angus complained. “The foundation isn’t big enough to support it. If the water gets any deeper the water will start to seep through and undermine the foundation.”

I was feeling contrary, “Why?”

Angus sighed again, “The pressure, the deeper it gets the greater the pressure down at the bottom will be. And that mortar your father used isn’t right for building under water, its already starting to erode.”

I bristled at the implication my father had made a mistake but I held my temper. “What if the water froze solid?” I asked him.

“What do you mean?”

“I can freeze the water behind the dam,” I stated.

“It’ll expand and crack the stones. As soon as it melted the whole thing would start coming down,” he replied. The tone in his voice implied he was talking to a child.

“It won’t melt,” I assured him.

“More water will keep coming; it’ll still ruin what we’ve built.”

“Then I’ll freeze that as well. Imagine this... I’ll turn what’s behind that wall into something like a glacier. As more water builds up I’ll freeze it as well. Then all you’ll need to build is a retaining wall, just enough to hold the fresh water at the top till I can freeze it as well,” I said.

“I’d say that’s crazy talk. You can’t keep freezing it forever and as soon as it began to melt the whole damn thing would come down,” Angus waved his arms as he spoke, agitation clear in his body language.

My temper snapped, “I don’t need it to last forever! I only need it to last long enough to kill a goddamn army in the spring. Don’t you get it Angus? That’s all I care about, killing as many damned people as possible!”

His face blanched as I spoke, “If that thing fails while the men are up there it’ll kill people long before the army gets here.”

“Then I’ll just be a murderer that much sooner,” I spat out. “Watch.” I walked to the wall and selected the biggest foundation stone, the one that stood in the center, blocking the old river bed. Using spells the same spells I had been repeating day after day on the iron bombs I created an enchantment to store energy within the stone. It had become such a habit it only took me a few minutes, despite the size of the stone. After that I modified the wards I used to store heat so they would draw heat from the water on the other side of the stone. I changed it slightly so it would work much more rapidly, then I released the spell to do its work.

At first nothing happened, so I led Angus up onto the dam itself, so we could see the water behind the wall. It was hard to see, but ice was forming below the surface. “I want you to start building a new wall, outside this one. It doesn’t need to be strong, just enough to capture any water that leaks through. No more than a foot thick, build it up on the dry side using the foundation that juts beyond this dam.”

“It won’t be strong enough to hold much,” he said rubbing his chin.

“It doesn’t have to be. Just build it quickly; I need it as tall as the dam itself within a week, after that it will need to keep up with the rising water. I’ll keep freezing the water out there to prevent it from putting much pressure on your secondary wall,” I told him.

In the end, he agreed, not that I gave him a choice. I spent the rest of the day enchanting the foundation stones, reasoning that they would be the best place to start. Plus they had the advantage of being the largest stones which meant they could hold more before exploding. Since they weren’t meant to be bombs I added a limiter to the heat absorption spell to stop it long before the stones were close to their limit. An explosion now would destroy any hope we had of completing the project before the spring.

The week passed slowly as I worked to freeze the water behind the dam. To speed our trips back and forth I created a teleportation circle at the dam site, with a matching one back in Cameron Castle. I made a side trip one afternoon to do the same at Lancaster, in the duke’s own suite. I didn’t want to think about the fact that if I had done that sooner Marc might have been able to get back in time to save my father, but I felt the guilt anyway.

Each morning I returned to the dam site. Once the largest stones within the dam were enchanted ice had formed out to a distance of more than forty feet beyond the dam itself. Water quickly began rising over the top and spilling across the center, cutting a channel in the ice there and threatening to washout the new retaining wall, to prevent that I got more ambitious. Moving up the smaller valley I found a massive boulder that was nearly submerged by the rising water. It was irregularly shaped, having formed long ago when the river had cut through the softer stone around it.

I had no way to estimate, but it had to weigh several hundred tons, at least. Working carefully I enchanted it and watched the ice begin forming around it. While I worked on freezing the river over the past few days I had had thoughts about how we would destroy the dam in the spring. The danger of storing so much energy in the stones had one welcome side-effect, it made for a simple method of destroying the dam come spring. I included a glass bead in my enchantment of several of the foundation stones, as well as with the enchantment of the large boulder. I was fairly