Mazelton wrote 118 at the top of the page he was sketching on. One hundred and eighteen miles. Step by step. He sighed and put down his pad, and joined the chow line. It was lentils again, but, well, it’s hard to pack more nutrition in a smaller, lighter package than lentils. Lentils made sense, were economical and good for digestion too. And if everyone was heartily sick of them before they even saw the ramparts… they beat dying.

Polyclitus had the look of a man debating that proposition. He moodily stirred his dinner, before angrily eating a few spoon fulls. Then back to moody stirring.

“So. Soon to Vast Green Isle.” Mazelton prompted.

“Yep. Soon there.”

“Any thoughts about the return leg of the journey?”

“Many.” Polilclitus looked far into the woods. What he was seeing, Mazelton couldn’t guess.

“Do you know what my number one job is? In my contract, I mean?”

“Preserve the owners’ interests?”

“That was what they had there. I moved it around slightly. My number one job is to bring my people home again. It’s a dangerous job. People just die sometimes. Had someone die on me once as soon as he signed the contract.” His deep eyes never left the woods. His voice continued softly. “But I do my best. I work hard at it. Damned hard.”

“They died as soon as they signed the contract?”

Polyclitus twitched his lips. It would have been a grin in happier times.

“Silly bugger was so happy, he tried to do a standing backflip. Muffed it, cracked his skull on the floor and croaked.”

“Damn!”

“Right?”

“Who mopped up?”

“Not me, that’s for damn sure.” The grin faded. “I do enough mopping up on the trail.”

“So what’s the plan once you hit the coast?”

“Still figuring that out, actually. See, a successful caravan isn’t just point to point- not just Sky’s Echo to Vast Green Isle. It’s all the trades at all the stops along the way. You have the one big cargo that is the core of your trade, but you make all these smaller trades on the way. Done right, the Caravan has paid for itself by the time it reaches its destination, and your core cargo is almost pure profit. Then you do it in reverse. That’s the ideal, of course. Easy to muck it up and be wiped out.”

“I guess I can see it?”

“It’s not complicated- Andyville has so much cotton they can’t stand it. So you buy it cheap- call it a penny per unit. But so did everyone else, and you can’t give cotton away anywhere remotely near Andyville. But Zetaborough is facing another cloth shortage due to the terrible whotsits invading. So you haul your cotton to Bakerton, where the cotton mills are. They buy your cotton for a not great price- three pennies a unit. Then you buy the finished cotton for five pennies a unit. So already you are facing a serious deficit, and that’s assuming your transportation costs are almost nothing. But you still need to get the cloth eight hundred miles inland, to Zetaborough, where bolts of cotton cloth go for thirty pennies a unit. How? You are already in the hole.”

“Small trades to finance the big trade?”

“Yeah. Like taking passengers.” He looked ironically at Mazelton. “Or guiding people for a modest fee. And so on.”

“Not sure how that gets us to your plans in Vast Green Isle and onward?”

“Big trade is locked in. That was set in stone before I rallied the Caravan at Sky’s Echo. It’s the small trades, and how to get my people home safe. See, the route we took? It’s close to optimal. No big detours, mostly pretty flat- you can stow that look, it really was, comparatively. Most of the time the grade didn’t even rise to ten degrees, and you may be very thankful for that.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Do that. Anyhow. Pretty much optimal for a land route from Sky’s Echo to Vast Green Isle. There are other roads, of course.”

“Sure.”

“But.”

“Big detours, and maybe not so good little trades?”

“In one. Although the “little trades” thing isn’t as cut and dry. That’s always shifting. The question is, can I line them up and knock them down safely.”

Mazelton smiled an empty little smile of his own.

“You don’t think so?”

“I have my concerns.”

“Lay them on me.”

“Not your problem.”

“Yeah. I’m a real good listener though.”

“Hah. Buy me a drink when you say that.” Polyclitus scoffed. Then reconsidered. “Actually, now that I think about it, do you even drink? Alcohol, I mean.”

“Naturally!”

“I don’t know that I have ever seen you drink.”

“You haven't. Too expensive.”

“Booze costs too much?! With how much you have been pulling in?”

“I’ve been spending it, you know that. I can’t afford enough high proof stuff to have any effect. So I don’t bother.”

“What do you mean “have an effect?” It’s rotgut. It rots your guts. That’s all it does.”

“Not me. Just… slides right off without a bit of extra chemical help.”

“Huh. That does explain a lot. Xia have the same thing?”

“More or less.”

“They always want to have a big party right before or after a big deal. Very heavy drinkers, I always thought.”

“Strictly speaking you're not wrong.”

“Just where it counts.” Polyclitus didn’t droop, but something inside of him slowly collapsed. “I don’t want to cross the land again. Not after all this.”

“I can’t imagine you will be taking settlers the other way.”

“Might take refugees, though. Except I damn well wont! A war broke out in my Caravan, Mazelton! A damn war, with machine guns, expolosives, chemical weapons, fire bombs, suicide bombers… I don’t even know what else. We found Mendiluze, did you know?”

“No, where?”

“In the bushes. Poor bastard had been torn to pieces. Literally gutted, animals had gotten into him. He was a pain in my ass, but we got each other, you know? He wasn’t the worst. He didn’t deserve to go out like that.”

“My perspective is… skewed on that one.”

“I know, I know. He hated you, wasn’t a secret.”

“He literally tried to have me killed.”

“Now that's-”

“He sent a pair of snipers after me. I spent days in a monastery healing. My ribs still aren’t all the way better.”

Policlitus looked scandalized, then depressed.

“That figures. That just about figures. I had wondered what the hell happened to you. Guess you got shot.”

“I got shot.”

“I really don’t want to cross the continent on land again. War is breaking out, and merchants always get it first. You either supply their side, or you are aiding the enemy. No such thing as a neutral party.”

“That is how it tends to go.”

“And that’s just the Collective. We have stone gods, the Nacon dry minds, at least two major tribal confederations about to go at it, and the Dusties who say they get along with everyone, but can be pretty clannish when you get right down to it. It says something that this whole struggle, the whole fight over a huge, mountainous territory, is being planned around fortified hamlets. You know what happens to a small, hostile hamlet without a lot of mobile army support?”

“Sieges?”

“Slaughters.” Polyclitus looked bleak. “Think about it- war is all about putting pressure on a point. Concentrate your forces, spread out theirs. You know all your enemies are in little immobile clumps scattered far apart? Bring out the artillery, crush ‘em one at a time, and keep cavalry handy to run down those who flee.”

Mazelton felt his stomach drop. “It can’t be that one sided. I mean, if you know that-”

“Then the Humbles behind the “grand strategy” do too. Yeah. But I don’t know what their angle is. But I do know it can’t be just this. There has to be some other move, and I can’t see what it is. And I don't want to find out the hard way.” Polyclitus was practically hissing at the end. “I want to get my people home safe, get me home safe, and not stir out again for a long, long while!”

“Where is home for you, Polyclitus? I think you mentioned some place a way down the Mud Dragon River?”

The older man snorted. “Three months ago, I’d have said home is right here, round a campfire with the caravan. Now? Now that little stretch of farm is looking really nice.”

“So you take a different route home?”

“Yeah. Can’t take a boat, no matter how much I want to. Just can’t afford to ship everything, even if we sold all the wagons and aurochs. Plus the journey can take up to three years and, yanno, people would like to get paid sooner than that. Me, for example.”

“Fair.”

“Eyoup. So. Yeah. Probably going to head down south. Not that far south, but, south. There are roads there, a little harder, a bit more out of the way, but some potentially big trades to make. We’ll see.”

“Pick up all the cores you can between here and New Scandie, I’ll see you equipped.”

“Hah. Well. I’ll do that.”

Mazelton tossed and turned in his cot. Home was supposed to be safe. The notion of home being made deliberately not safe was making him sick. He could see it. “Bandits” or tribal raiders supported by their various factions, sweeping in and slaughtering isolated farms. Or big groups of them getting together and extorting villages until there was nothing left but the people… then taking them too. He couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand it.

He sat up, sleep had escaped him. He hauled out a light core, and just stared at it angrily. Cores were always radiating. Not very much, and not very usefully, in their natural state. They had to be polished and perked up to be their most potent self. They didn’t have an on or off switch- they couldn’t. But you could calibrate how much heat you fed into them. And how much they were stimulated into releasing their own heat.

He stared at one of his larger cores. Not a large core, but hypothetically, he could grind it down and reform it into two titchy little cores. And hypothetically, he could link those two cores, and use them to communicate. But he didn’t know how. It wasn’t the full on mysticism of stone calling, but it was a big step in that direction.

Mazelton’s idea, unabashedly romantic, was to have his core radiate a signal, and the other core, one he would pay someone to race ahead and deliver to Danae, would glow brighter and brighter the closer he got to the farm.

He could make that work. From about, oh, as much as a couple of yards away. Everyone else in the room would be enjoying a really exciting dose of radiation, but it would work. Just pump out heat from one core and the little radioactive atoms slam into the other core and get those atoms all excited. And off you go.

“Squish enough cores together, hard enough, fast enough, and in just the right shape, and you can very briefly re-create the sun. This usually kills you and the city you happen to be in, so, you know, don’t. Unless you think you should.” He did remember that lesson. Generally every time someone called him a little ray of sunshine.

Ok, so direct stimulation wasn’t going to work. That was a no-no. Like blowing up a city. He still didn’t know what “just the right shape” was, but he always figured that it couldn’t be too hard to work out. Focus, focus.

Alright, he needed to get the ‘receiver’ stone to agitate itself when it got a signal from the transmitting stone, and have it get more and more active the stronger the signal got. That was possible, but… how? It wasn’t just a case of the carving pattern. One just had to put out heat, the other just had to put out light. Easy peasy. But connecting the two, that would be damn hard. Generally, they had to be very close in origin, or the power differential would have to be huge. Like pouring water from a bucket into an empty hole.

One full, the other empty. A power differential. Like his black sun core. No. Surely not. He couldn’t turn these cores into a black sun core, they didn’t have nearly the heat density for it. But. Hypothetically. What if…

Mazelton ground up four heat cores, sifting and refining them as best he could into a homogeneous mass of dust. He packed half the dust into a little mold, cinched the whole thing shut in a carpenter’s vice, and fused it with a serious dose of his own heat. Then he did the same with the second batch of dust. When he was done, he had two small cores that were as close to identical as he could manage.

On one, he carved a simple light core. He made the shade as close as possible to the look of natural sunlight. He goosed it with a little power, and it looked quite nice. Small, dim, but nice. The other’s job was just to store heat. So he pumped more and more heat into it, tapping other cores to really load it up. He then tapped his black sun core to “empty” the light core, and link the “empty” line into the battery, while running power in the opposite direction.

Nothing happened.

Because the power balanced out, which means that there was nothing to drive the light. He tweaked it. The light glowed faintly. Mazelton started to giggle foolishly. He was feeling simultaneously romantic, and much less worried about the coming war.

Everything had a core. It wouldn’t be energy efficient to try and make that core, say, radiate lethal doses of radiation into its owner. But if you were sitting on a chunk of land that radiated a lot of heat, next to a river carrying heat passively from all over the north west, all free for the harvesting. Well. Efficiency wasn’t going to be the problem. Finding a suitable test subject was.