The Butcher of Gadobhra

Georges was standing on the highest point of Rowan keep, which happened to be a pole that extended 200 feet into the air.

He'd needed a good view of the area from a tall point to make the best use of one of his skills. The highest point in Rowan Keep was barely a hundred feet up. His team of workers had built fifty feet of wooden scaffolding on top of the highest tower, and when that wasn't high enough, the workers added a long beam made from a tree shaved down to the size of a telephone pole. Pegs were hammered in on both sides to turn it into a ladder.

It was an ugly solution, but it was temporary.

From here he could see all of the existing keep and his skill let him see the layout for the new walls, gates, and additional buildings. To his eyes, a large copy of his plans was overlaid on the ground in glowing lines of different color. Positions of walls, towers, buildings, and ditches were easily adjusted. The new keep would be star-shaped with large towers on five points, and gates at two of wall intersections.

After many small adjustments, he was satisfied with the positioning of everything, and triggered the second part of his ability. He became a little light headed and almost fell as Show them and they will Build It drained three thousand mana from him. The lines that before were only visible to him were suddenly seen by anyone. They could now perfectly dig out the foundations for the walls, and begin laying the stone.

When finished, the fortress would be roughly star-shaped. The basic area of the fort was a large pentagon. At each corner, a diamond shaped tower jutted outward. The walls were constructed in two sections and bowed inward slightly, creating a kill zone where both sides of a wall could support each other, with further destructive fire coming from both towers. Three of the wall sections had a small tower in the center, and two had much larger gatehouses with portcullis and doors on both ends. One pointed to Sedgewick, and the other to the road south.

And this would put a stop to some problems that had been happening.

Originally, Georges has used his surveying skills to lay out of the fort, and mark everything with stakes and rope. Things hadn't gone well. At first, he thought he was making mistakes, and days were lost when digging was done in the wrong areas. Eventually he came to realize that someone, or several someone's, were moving his markers. It had been tough to catch even one of them, but bear traps aren't fooled by stealth skills. After catching the first saboteur, he'd hoped that the problems would stop. They didn't and he had to ask for help.

Rolly and Squirmie volunteered, they brought along a group of mercenaries led by a talking deer. The Baron sent over a player named McTeeth along with several other players McTeeth vouched for. All of them faded into the woods and shadows, and most of the troubles went away.

Over the next week they caught and disposed of seventeen different people trying to wreck the project. Most were players, and Rolly had just killed them all in interesting ways after they were captured and relieved of all of their gear. The financial loss was a good deterrent for players, and if they tried to do the job in cheap leather, they were very easy to catch. Five had been people paid to do the sabotage, who were out of work and from one village or another. Those got a choice: Death or a week’s hard labor and the guarantee of death if they came back. All chose to work, and surprisingly, three asked to stay on and work for the Baron, asking to bring their families to the area. Georges put them on the payroll and put them back to work. He needed all the man-hours he could get.

Once he hit Tier 3 and chose the Contract Worker: Fortress Builder class, things got easier. The best part of the class was the new skill: Show them and they will Build It. Unless whoever was causing problems had access to a high-level mage with some type of dispel ability, those lines were staying down. High level mages were very expensive. And more expensive if you asked them to risk being killed by murderous insects, ferocious deer, and knives in the dark.

One chore done, only a few thousand to go. He needed to check the placement of the slabs that formed the base of first wall section, and then they could begin consecrating that part of the foundation. It had taken longer to place the slabs without Ozzy, but the project didn't stop because you were down one man, it just got harder.

Wood was stacked in many areas. The beams made from towering oaks were in piles held off the ground by stone supports, with enough space between the beams for air to move around them. By the time they were needed, they'd be well seasoned. Hardware, nails, spikes, hinges and other metal goods were now being kept safe in a reinforced stone building. The loss of the first barrel of nails had alerted him to the problem with thieves. The thefts had gone down after they brought in their own thieves to catch saboteurs, but they were still being careful. Too many small things were going wrong, and he didn't think it was from negligence or chance.

His vantage point on high gave him a view of the road. Legion troops and a lot of flags and wagons. The wagons were empty though. Coming up for meat? But why all the flags? He shrugged. Not his problem.

And then he noticed one of the flags was from the Legion's Office of Acquisition, and heard raised voices from below. Maybe he needed to take a look at what was going on. He slid down the pole, jumped the fifty feet to the tower, and was in the courtyard a few seconds later for when the shouting really started.

Suzette, Ben, and the workers around them had been told what to expect, but were still startled as the colored lines representing an oversized set of Georges plans appeared on the ground. The Legionnaires had also been told and word had been passed, so only a few of them yelled profanity or dropped something. The party of people approaching the keep were entirely startled by what was going on, especially the horses pulling the empty wagons. But as the sentries on the walls didn't react, they moved on into the keep, a few of them observing and very thoughtful.

The section of foundation Suzette was standing in was correct, with a green line up top at the edge of each ditch, and another in blue at the edge of the wall down below. Further on one of the thirty-foot deep ditches was off course a few inches, and workers started correcting the problem and moving the stones at the base a few inches. She eyed the long slab of granite she was standing on. It was snug against the outside wall, one-foot thick, two-feet wide, and sixteen-feet long.

Ben had carved perfect 4-inch diameter circles into the stone with a diamond tipped compass of his own design. It carved a one-inch-deep circle into the stone far faster than she'd thought possible when he'd volunteered to help with this project and shown her the little tool. One circle was at each end of slab, and two more spaced along the stone's length. She took out her paints and started drawing a complicated set of runes into each circle. Hermes had suggested this method. The inscribed circle filled with channeled mana would preserve the special inks and acted as a separate Hermetic Seal. The runes would link to each other along the stone’s length. She'd chosen four as the number of runes, and a section of stone 4x4 feet long. Hermes’s sacred number was four, so it seemed appropriate, and he'd been delighted at her attention to detail.

When she got to the last rune, she saw that Ben had linked them together with four line segments that were divided by the crack between the two stones. The slabs had been cut and polished to butt together almost perfectly, with only a bit of mortar needed. It was exacting work, but the villages higher level stone masons were gaining special skills that made the work possible. She looked over the entire set of runes, and then poured mana into it. It worked, but not well. One of the runes wasn't right. She corrected the flaw in the design and tested again. This time it felt much stronger.

Hermes had been a huge help in designing the entire set of runes for creating a gigantic Hermetic Seal around all of the walls. Georges class had told him it was possible, and listed the specialists needed to achieve it. None of whom he could just hire. But he did have a priestess of Hermes handy, and a jack-of-all-trades Courier who was experimenting with runes. She'd spent several nights in Hermes realm working on the project, and even more once Ozzy had disappeared. It was better than the nightmares she had when she wasn't there. Bit by bit she and Ben had worked out what was needed to make the spell work. When Ben got worried about the math involved, he'd grabbed Rolly to go over things. Squirmie had been helpful as well, giving Georges an eye in the sky for his original surveying.

With the test case done, she went to a large stone slab that was adjacent to the first sixteen-foot slab running along the walls. This piece was a 19-ton monster made of Black Granite. The stone wrights working in the quarries had gone deep enough that they sometimes found veins of the hard, tier 2, stone. This slab was sixteen feet on each side. It had been cut at the quarry for this project and was carefully moved with rollers to the keep, and then down a long ramp to its final position. It was the start of the spell. She'd spent nearly a week drawing the runes and spell-work, followed by Ben carving them into the stone.

Nervously, she linked the Keystone to the first slab. Then Ben and several of the workers began pushing their mana into the Keystone. She felt as it flowed along the runes, activating them one by one until the spell encompassed both stones. In theory, it was working. One section done, and hundreds to go.

Watching nearby were three of her new apprentices. Sasha, Chuck, and Ada had all been interested in her talks on Hermetics and had been attending her classes whenever she had time to hold them. All three were learning scrimshaw and had made a dozen magical boar-tusk knives each. Sasha had been the first to tell her that she had earned the Hermetics skill. Her method had been to finally learn to swim by throwing herself into the deepest part of the river while holding a large rock. She'd drowned three times before she learned to swim. The paradox gained her the new skill of both Swimming and Hermetics. Chuck and Ada had found other examples of Paradox, and Hermes had been happy to welcome all of them.

Suzette had been relieved to have help on the huge project, and even more relieved when Alister, Zephyr, and Adrianna had offered their aid. Alister had years of experience in rune-work and carving the magical symbols into stone. Zephyr and her mother had less experience, but both had steady hands for painting the basic rune-work, and a good knowledge of Hermetics.

With the success of the Keystone and the first slab, she called it a day. They had just climbed out of the foundations when they heard the sound of yelling coming from the courtyard, and Georges unmistakable, deep voice.

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