24. Violence Begets Magic

Violence Begets Magic

Legion Commander Mott took a bite of thin bread spread with butter and honey, chewed the unpleasantly soft mouthful, and forced himself not to show his disgust.

To fail to display appreciation for the produce of a new land risked inviting ill fortune upon an expedition. Yet the quality of these things was nearly unbearable. The bread had no substance, too much starch and far too little fiber. The butter was adulterated with crude, inferior oils. The so-called honey was less honey than sugar pretending to have a history.

Some incompetent alchemist had attempted to artificially enhance the flavors and blend them together to satisfy more delicate palates, hiding the defects of the food itself. Perhaps it could fool those who had never tasted real cuisine.

It did not fool Mott.

After more than a century of advancement, Mott could chew thorns from the cliffs of Mavis without a twitch crossing his face.

He took another bite of the second slice of bread, this one dusted with chalk-whitened salt, chewed, and swallowed.

Then he burned both pieces of bread as an offering to the builders of the towers, concluding the rite.

Once the thing pretending to be food had turned to ash, the smell it released was satisfactory. It spread through the room he had requisitioned, and he leaned back against a sofa that faintly reminded him of the bone-and-leather seats of home.

By his assessment, the sofa was made mostly of glue. Its hard portions were fine sawdust bound together with glue. Most of the fabric was strange glue stretched and woven into threads. Most of the stuffing was some glue-like substance transformed into foam.

Under the weight of his body, more than two meters tall and heavily built, the sofa creaked.

Like almost everything around him, it radiated decay in his magical senses. It had clearly been deliberately made to fall apart sooner than it should.

When his lord extended his perception into the ether in search of a suitable target for their portal magic, that aura of decay was what had first drawn his attention: a civilization built upon the ruins of things.

What arcane secrets would they discover there? What fruits of progress might be traded?

Mott’s disappointment had been difficult to describe when he learned that the people here possessed not a trace of magic.

They had expected to encounter an advanced civilization with which trade might be possible. Instead they had stumbled upon barbarians.

No matter. If they could not be partners, they could still be pieces on the board.

Mott banished the distracting thoughts and turned his mind’s eye toward his task.

First dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of distant images clamored for his attention. Again and again he divided his focus to manage them.

He knew that certain powerful mages could flatten a town with a single blow, yet could not process the multiple viewpoints required of a legion officer.

Just as a decurion could scry through and command ten subordinates at once, and a centurion could command one hundred, a legion commander had to handle at least a thousand perspectives.

Unlike simple communication tools or spells that anyone could use, Mott possessed a complete understanding of the battlefield, the sort of awareness those reliant on maps and messengers could not even imagine.

He was there when an ironbeak melted yet another enemy scout into slag. He commanded a hundred skeleton archers to fire at a distant target they could not see. He watched one of the newest towers torn bodily from its foundation.

As with all things, scrying was imperfect.

To the people of this utterly magicless land, he would seem nearly divine. But where those with magic of their own were concerned, matters were not so clear.

Mott had spent twenty years beside the Weather Witch of the Desolate Peak before he mastered weather magic. It was that magic which allowed him, through the whispering of the wind, to learn where his attention was being unexpectedly deflected, where things happened before his mind’s eye without being seen.

A subtle influence had spread across the entire city like an invisible net, warping his perception and nudging plans off course.

The plan to build and fortify this small city into a proper stronghold was now nearly a week behind schedule. He could wait no longer.

It had been such a good, straightforward plan when he and his lord conceived it.

Magic could arise from any deliberate effort to create magic, from any method and belief by which one chose to transcend reality while paying a price.

It was a contradiction that many people failed to understand and many more refused to accept.

In war, however, it could be exploited.

Even if the enemy possessed magic of their own, it would not operate under the same concepts. Whichever side spread its concept of magic more widely would gain the advantage.

The mage-lords of Mavis had invented their own magical tradition around a concept that seemed simple:

Violence begets magic.

With that idea as the foundation of their power, every conflict and every battle made them stronger. It did not matter who won or lost, so long as the war continued.

Lord Mott had gone a step further. For people with no magical tradition of their own, if they were shown clearly enough where magic came from, the locals would accept the same concept and the same magic.

From that point onward, converting them to their side—or controlling them indirectly—would become simple.

Looking back now, treating these barbarians as stupid had been a mistake, however primitive they undoubtedly were.

They might have no magic. They might lack proper education. They might still use plumbing and fossil fuels.

But they had minds. They had ideas.

The thinking of one of them had come extremely close to Mavis magic, close enough to make use of the same energies Mott had deliberately cultivated throughout the city, yet different enough in application to form a magical tradition of their own.

Somehow, many of the locals both understood and believed in the idea of gaining power through violence, and also believed it was not real, while striving toward specific outcomes all the same.

If not for interference from another mage of unknown origin, he could have strangled it in its infancy.

Now this magic had spread to dozens of people, and the situation could no longer be reversed. Once an idea rooted itself in minds—and in the magical structures those minds imprinted—it became extremely difficult to eradicate.

He needed to eliminate the followers of this new tradition as soon as possible.

At present, however, he had another urgent problem.

The local army had finally mobilized.