Chapter 1230: An Emergency Meeting
Barov was woken by his servant.
During wartime the Administrative Office kept vigil in rotating shifts, so that whoever was on duty could reach him immediately if anything out of the ordinary occurred.
Edith no longer worked in the Administrative Office, but her hand still lay over Roland’s ear in certain ways — Barov had noticed long since that the king tended to seek counsel from the General Staff before settling on a course. The awareness of that rival, brilliant and always nearby, had become a kind of whetstone. Barov had learned to keep his edge against it.
That, though, was not the only reason he drove himself as hard as he did.
He liked being busy. Busy meant indispensable. It meant Neverwinter required him. And every task he completed well was another brick in the wall of the king’s trust — a wall Barov intended to keep building, course by course, for as long as his hands held out.
He slid out of bed and pulled on his coat. “Tell me. What is it?”
“Sir, a command from His Majesty. He calls a meeting at the boardroom in the castle. All ministers are to come at once.”
“Now?” Barov turned toward the window. Outside, the city was dark in the specific way it went dark in the small hours, when even the last lamp had given up.
“Yes, sir. The telephone operator gave no details. Should I send someone ahead to the castle to confirm—”
“No,” Barov said quickly. The call had come through the Administrative Office; there was no room for miscommunication there. He was also, he reminded himself, the only minister who had a telephone at home — which meant the rest of them would have to be reached on foot. “Send the servants to notify the others. Every minister. If you miss a single one, it comes back on you.”
The servant flinched and bowed.
Barov would have hesitated, once, at a summons like this. That was when Roland had been the old prince, uncertain and difficult to read. But Roland had become a king, and a competent one. If he had chosen this hour for a meeting, the matter behind it was not one that could wait for morning.
“I won’t be going alone,” Barov added, already reaching for his gloves. “I’ll fetch the Pearl of the Northern Region myself.”
“Your Majesty, nearly everyone is assembled,” Nightingale said, settling a coat over Roland’s shoulders with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done it a hundred times. “Shall I bring tea?”
“Please,” Roland said. Then, after a pause: “Sorry to wake you.”
“It’s nothing.” She smiled. “I wasn’t tired at all. I was only pretending.”
“Pretending?”
“No — no.” Her composure slipped a fraction, just enough to show. “I mean, I did yawn, but it was because my eyes were dry. That’s all. Incidentally — is Anna coming?”
“Let her rest.” Roland shook his head. “She shouldn’t need to worry about this. She’s been stretched thin enough already.”
Anna had been at the North Slope laboratory almost without pause, pressing forward on the Cube-powered motor while simultaneously developing the biplanes. Two projects; one person; both urgent.
“You’ve been stretched thin as well,” Nightingale said, and handed him the tea. “You didn’t sleep in the Dream World, did you?”
“It’s fine. I’m used to keeping odd hours.” He wrapped both hands around the cup, and the warmth traveled up through his palms. In the world he’d come from, late nights had been ordinary. This was nothing he hadn’t carried before — he only needed to sleep later, to make up the debt. The alternative was carrying unfinished work to bed, and that was always worse. “I can’t sleep well if I haven’t done what needed doing.”
He drained the cup in one long swallow and set it down.
“Let’s go.”
When Lightning finished her report, the boardroom went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with calm.
Everyone was awake. Everyone wore the expression of a person running calculations they did not like the answer to.
Agatha turned toward Roland, something apprehensive in the angle of her jaw. “Your Majesty, we—”
“This isn’t your fault,” Roland said. “The rapid growth in Senior Demons and Spider Demons had already told us the enemy was different from the one four hundred years ago. Apparently they’ve been working too.” There was nothing to gain from reproaching the Taquila witches for intelligence that had simply been overtaken by events. The Neverwinter garrison and the witches had built their mutual understanding on the strength of what the third Battle of Divine Will had looked like four centuries ago. An enemy that had progressed in the interval was not something anyone could have foreseen.
He let the silence hold for one more moment, then continued.
“The Exploration Group cannot confirm the Red Mist’s presence outright. But it reached the crest of the Impassable Mountain Range. I expect we’ll hear from the front within a week.” He scanned the room. “The question before us now: what do we do in the event the demons can activate the Obelisk quickly? Before we discuss that, I want to know exactly how much Red Mist an activated Obelisk can produce.”
Agatha’s hands were still on the table. She gathered her answer slowly, the way you gather something fragile. “When the Union found the special demon at the bottom of the mine, we concluded that the Obelisk is a type of giant Magic Stone — the same way a small stone embedded in a demon derives from a Chaos Beast, but the Obelisk comes from raw ore. The properties are unique, but the scale depends on the deposit it grows from. However…”
“Go on,” Roland said. “Incomplete intelligence is still better than none. Wars change. If our estimate misses the mark, we correct it.”
The Ice Witch exhaled and nodded. “Based on the Union’s prior experience, and accounting for Lightning’s information on the mine’s location — if the Obelisk draws from a God’s Stone deposit comparable in size to the one beneath Taquila, the Red Mist it produces could reach…”
She conjured an icicle and placed its tip against the map.
“That’s — the Archduke Island?” Edith said. She was already thinking.
“Yes. If we use the Taquila area as the origin of the rupture, then the coverage boundary falls somewhere around the Impassable Mountain Range.” Agatha traced the extent with the icicle’s point. “The Mist won’t flood that far at once. It permeates gradually, and it slows as it spreads. The first few days carry it the farthest. After that, covering a radius of a hundred kilometers could take another few months.”
The seizure of Taquila in advance had mattered more than anyone had said at the time. Had they been slower — had the railway only just been finished now instead of already operational — the Red Mist would have been pouring down from the Impassable Mountain Range across all four kingdoms while the First Army was still trying to move. Red Mist was lethal to witches. Even with their superior weapons, the army could not fight effectively inside it.
“Then we must move faster,” Roland said, and looked to Edith. “Does the General Staff have a plan?”
“Of course.” Edith said it without hesitation; she had been the first to read the demons’ intentions, and she knew the terrain of this particular problem better than anyone in the room. “Though the demons are moving faster than we anticipated, erecting the Obelisk at the ridge of the continent is still, from a strategic standpoint, their last resort. The ridge is good cover but poor ground for launching attacks — which gives us time to answer them. The General Staff’s position is this: if the demons do emerge in the Kingdom of Everwinter, our defensive line will not be in Graycastle.”
She pressed her finger to the map.
It landed on the Cage Mountain, in the Kingdom of Dawn.