Chapter 778: Commandeering a Meeting
Roland remained crouched for a moment, turning over what the central carrier had just demonstrated.
Nine-digit multiplication. Instantaneous. Whether she operated through repeated summation, column method, or some principle he had no name for, the result was exact and immediate. The practical implications arranged themselves without much effort: she could verify the calculations of the Arithmetic Academy—every large-scale computation, every engineering estimate, every financial projection. At minimum, she could catch errors that slipped through human review. The value of that function alone was difficult to overstate. Even if she could only ever answer yes or no, this entity would save incalculable amounts of time.
Without thinking about it, he patted one of her main tentacles, the way he might clap a colleague on the shoulder.
“You’re brilliant.”
The red light went out.
Pasha, gently: “Your Majesty, she can’t directly communicate with you.”
“She understands my words. She gives yes and no answers.” Roland stood, untroubled. “That already constitutes communication. The difficulty is on the output side, not the understanding side.”
He did not intend to leave it there. The yes-or-no constraint was real, but constraints had workarounds. A carefully structured binary protocol—the kind of thing programmers in his original world had built entire systems from—might let the carrier express considerably more. The question was engineering, not fundamental limitation.
He thought about it for a moment, then decided to test one angle.
“Suppose we assign values. One lit tentacle means one. Two lit tentacles means two.” He waited for her stillness to indicate she was attending. “Can you show me three?”
The question looked simpler than the multiplication problem—and was, mathematically. But it asked something structurally different. Not just verification, but active output: displaying a value she chose, rather than confirming one he provided.
She did not answer immediately.
After a few seconds, one tentacle began to glow. A second shimmered—bright, then uncertain, the light fluctuating. The third stayed dark.
Roughly thirty percent correct, Roland calculated.
That reading lasted only a moment. The second tentacle’s light steadied briefly, then went out. Then the first followed.
Dark. All three.
“That’s… a no?” he said, more to himself than to anyone.
Celine moved beside him and let out a sound that had the quality of a quiet sigh—thoughtful, not sad. “That question exceeds her capacity. What you asked required her to output a value in a new encoding system she had never used before. When she can’t answer purely with yes or no, she slows down and loses coherence.” She paused. “We’ve tried similar approaches—asking her to express short phrases, basic concepts. Each time she realizes she can’t reduce her response to a clean binary, she stalls. Once she stalled for several weeks before accepting questions again.”
Roland felt a flicker of something that was almost guilt. “Did I just… create a logical barrier in her thinking?”
“She’ll recover in time. I once asked her a self-contradictory question, and she refused to accept input for over a month. But it passed.” Celine’s tentacles moved in what Roland had begun to read as a reassuring gesture.
He straightened and considered the problem properly. The carrier was a biological computer with extraordinary processing capacity and a structurally limited interface. Designing a new communication protocol to expand that interface was not beyond imagination—it was essentially a question of information encoding, of building meaning from minimal signals—but it was well outside his own training. He understood the concept. He did not understand the implementation.
He let it go for now. It was a problem for people with the right expertise: engineers, mathematicians, possibly the academy staff. Not a problem he could solve standing in a cave.
“The carriers need heat and moisture to function,” he said, moving to practical matters. “Is there a magma source nearby?”
“Fran hasn’t tunneled that deep yet,” Pasha said, “but we found a boiling underground river not far from here. The sulfur content suggests lava flow somewhere close. For the central carrier, we pump water from the river and bathe her with it every few days. It seems sufficient.”
Hot water. Not magma. A boiler could replicate that. Roland filed the thought—carefully, without acting on it. The Taquila witches had just arrived; the trust between them was a seedling, not yet something that could bear weight. Asking to relocate their most sensitive asset to the Arithmetic Academy now would be presumptuous regardless of how reasonable the long-term case for it was. He would wait until the snow mountain expedition had built something more substantial between them.
He toured the rest of the Third Border City before returning to Neverwinter. What had been built was a frame, not yet a structure—rough tunnels, temporary spaces, the bones of something that might one day become what he had named it. True defensive value would come later: when tunnels connected the peaks of the Impassable Mountain Range, when artillery emplacements were added above ground, when the stronghold was genuinely incorporated into Neverwinter’s outer defensive line. For now, it served as shelter and as proof of concept.
Back in the castle, he summoned the department leaders of City Hall to the reception hall.
A curtain of purple light materialized slowly in the air before them—Pasha projecting herself through the Illusion Core—and expanded until it filled the room.
Roland had warned them in advance. He had been precise about what they would see and had kept nothing back. It made no difference. The faces around the table changed anyway: Sirius Daly, the young Minister of Agriculture, struck his teacup hard enough to send it spinning across the table; Barov pressed a handkerchief to his forehead and did not put it down; Kyle Sichi and the Astrologer of Dispersion Star stared at the light curtain with the expressions of people who had just heard something in a dark house and were deciding whether to run.
If Roland had not been sitting calmly in his chair, several of them probably would have.
He looked around the table. Every face read fear, except one.
Edith, the Pearl of the Northern Region, had startled—a single sharp movement, quickly suppressed—and then her expression had shifted to something that functioned like appetite. Curiosity dressed up as composure. And when she looked at Roland, her eyes held something he had not seen from her before: a recalibration, as though a number she had been working with had just changed.
Women, Roland thought, with genuine bewilderment. I will never understand how that accounting works.
He had expected the officials’ fear. He had also expected their resistance. Fear and resistance were different problems. Fear passed; resistance required management.
His purpose in gathering them was simple: the ancient witches hidden in the mountain could not stay hidden from City Hall indefinitely. When someone noticed the tunnel work, the unusually guarded perimeter, the smoke from the underground river—questions would follow, and rumor was harder to manage than disclosure. Two years in City Hall had, he believed, widened these men’s apertures. They were not the same people he had inherited.
He explained everything. Who the Taquila witches were, what they had survived, how they had moved their relics and their equipment from Taquila to the Third Border City under First Army escort. He explained what the snow mountain expedition was, why it was necessary, and how the Taquila God’s Punishment Witches and the Witch Union had complementary capabilities that made working together the most rational approach.
The response was not enthusiastic.
Barov cited the timing: the Finance Department’s annual accounts were nearly complete, and introducing new budget requirements now was disruptive. He added that with troops already deployed to the Southernmost Region, the Border Area’s defense posture had been stretched thin enough.
Carter doubted the safety of joint operations with entities whose allegiances could not be verified. He argued that internal conflicts within a mixed expedition force were more dangerous than any external threat.
Sirius listed the grain stocks and found them insufficient to support another major deployment alongside the ongoing desert mission.
Karl raised geological concerns: the ancient witches had excavated extensively through the mountain range, and he was not confident that the mining and furnace areas above were stable.
Roland listened to all of it. He heard, beneath the specific objections, the common shape: they were telling him not to trust the tentacle blobs. Every argument, however technically framed, pointed in the same direction.
This is not a parliament, he reminded himself. I can act when they cannot reach consensus. I built the institution; I am not bound by its inertia.
He had done this before—when he had first decided to shield the witches in Border Town, before anyone understood why, when everyone around him had reasons and warnings and reservations.
He knocked on the table.
The room went silent.
He rose and moved behind the officials—so they had to turn, or not, to see him—and spoke.
“When the Months of Demons end, we enter the most important year Graycastle has seen. I will unify the kingdom. I will hold the coronation and be crowned king in fact, not merely in name—and every one of you sitting here will become ministers of that kingdom.”
He let that settle. Two years ago, it would have sounded like vanity from a mad prince. A year ago, like an ambitious long-term goal. Today, no one in this room doubted it. They had watched Neverwinter’s growth too closely, worked inside the machine too long.
Every official at the table rose and pressed a right hand to their chest.
“Your Majesty—it is our honor.”
The doubt in their faces did not vanish, but it stepped back. Roland gestured them down.
“My Graycastle will extend north to the Hermes Plateau, south to the Endless Cape, west to the Barbarian Land, and east to the Fjord Islands.” He moved back toward the head of the table. “To accomplish that, the First Army will be occupied continuously—which means fewer defenders at home. I need to secure the snow mountain now, while I still have the resources to do it. I will not leave an unknown threat in the mountains directly above my king’s city when the main force marches out.”
Carter, quietly: “Your Majesty—the First Army and the Witch Union together might be sufficient for the snow mountain—”
“No.” Roland cut the suggestion cleanly. “In an underground cave with complex terrain and no prepared firing positions, firearms and artillery have limited effectiveness. We have no maps, no established lines. If hybrid demonic beasts are waiting in that darkness, the cost in First Army lives would be unacceptable. This is why the Taquila witches are essential—their God’s Punishment Warriors don’t fear what our soldiers would have to fear. Complementary strengths, covered retreat. That is the most prudent possible arrangement.”
Carter went quiet.
Roland looked around the table with an expression that left no room for continued debate.
“Listen to me carefully. Do not tell me things are difficult to implement. You are sitting here to find solutions. If you cannot do that—” a pause that had weight in it— “my City Hall has no use for people who can’t.”
He looked at Barov.
“Barov Mons.”
The old director flinched. “Your Majesty!”
“Can the final accounts and expedition logistics be managed?”
Barov wiped his forehead. “Yes. I believe so. I’ll have a plan for you in five days.”
“Three.”
Barov swallowed. “Three days. Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Sirius Daly.”
The Minister of Agriculture straightened. “Your Majesty.”
“If the Border Area stocks are low, supplement them from the Longsong surplus. We have enough concrete boats. That is not an obstacle—that is a logistics problem. Solve it.”
“Yes, Your Majesty!”
“Karl Van Bate.”
“Your Majesty—I will conduct a thorough geological survey of the mining and furnace areas.”
“Good.” Roland moved back toward the head of the table and sat. “Then let’s continue.”
One by one, the remaining objections resolved themselves—not because the problems had vanished, but because the king’s decision had. With that settled, practical solutions emerged with reasonable speed.
Pasha’s voice returned to the hall, arriving directly in the officials’ minds without visible source.
Most of them went rigid. But they had already promised—and they could see Roland calmly engaging with this sound as though it were a perfectly ordinary voice—so they did what composure allowed: they pressed their chins toward their chests, fixed their eyes on the table, and waited for it to be over. They did not flee. That was sufficient.
Edith was the exception. She faced the light curtain directly, spoke when she had something to add, and watched the exchange with the same focused attention she brought to everything.
After some deliberation, the Taquila witches agreed to contribute fifty God’s Punishment Witches. The Witch Union would join them as the core force of the expedition. The First Army would provide five hundred soldiers under Brian’s command, setting sentry lines and securing retreat routes. The troops remaining in Neverwinter would be left to Carter and continue the ongoing defense of the border.
That settled, Roland was about to close the meeting when Edith raised her hand.
“Your Majesty, I wish to apply for a place on the Snow Mountain Exploration Team.”
Barov’s expression contracted. “You’re neither a witch nor a soldier. Don’t complicate His Majesty’s plan.”
“I served as a fencing coach in a knight battalion,” she said, without inflection. “I have defeated every opponent I’ve faced, including demonic beasts, in under five rounds. I can defend myself.”
Roland looked at her with genuine curiosity. “Your reason?”
“The Battle of Divine Will approaches, and none of the officials in this hall know what a demon or an underground creature actually looks like.” Her voice was measured and steady, the words chosen for usefulness rather than effect. “If we don’t know our enemy, we can’t anticipate what the war will require from us. Someone might think that because the First Army fights the battles, the other departments are insulated—but once the fighting begins, every department will be called on. Construction and agriculture will answer to the needs of a war they’ve never seen. The most effective officials are ones who understand what they’re preparing for. I want to understand it.”
Barov opened his mouth and found he had no immediate answer. What she had said was difficult to argue with and impossible to dismiss.
Roland noticed his own thoughts moving in an unexpected direction. A standing rule: promotion reserved for officials who had served near the front lines. It would ensure that no one governing in wartime was governing blind—that no City Hall functionary issued decrees based on ignorance of what they were asking the kingdom to sustain. He didn’t implement it yet. But he kept it.
He looked at Edith.
“Get ready for the expedition.”
She smoothed back the hair beside her ear and bowed, and there was something in her expression that, for just a moment, let something through.
“Yes, Your Majesty.”