3:165 on the 3rd day of Winter
I didn't end up sleeping much after the day I had. My nightmares had nightmares and I gave up long before sunrise. I quietly snuck down to the library with a light crystal and started going through the books. When I say family library most folks on Earth will think of a large room lined with bookshelves, maybe even with ladders to help reach even more books. That was not what they were on Root at least not for anyone but a king or queen. Our family library had a total of three bookshelves with seven shelves each. We owned perhaps two hundred books in total which was a large collection. Most were hand written and relatively short. The remainder came out of the early printing presses in Cinder or the capital. My family had a broad collection on a range of topics but my focus today would be on the ones discussing types of magic.
I started with a printed volume titled "Magic: power over the world." It was one of my introductory textbooks. I flipped to the section I remembered discussing death magic.
In the year of the emperor 1167 there was a man in the city of Deluge that awakened with death magic just before being hanged for the mundane murder of his brother. The man, later referred to by the moniker The Murderer, was the only one in a crowd numbering no less than three hundred souls who walked away alive. The town square where it occurred was blocked off and remains so to this day. Anyone that enters dies soon after.
That turned my stomach but it made sense in light of my own experience. I looked through the book for more references and I ended up finding one in the chapter on different types of magic. It was less than helpful.
Death mages command the element of death. Very little is known about their capabilities.
I put that book down and I picked up one on the rarer magic types titled "The arcane of the arcane." It had long sections on metal and lightning magic and even a full page on sound magic which is a specialization of air magic. Specializations would never be awakened as a mage's element directly but could be learned through intense training from the base element. The book's section on death magic was only half a page.
Death magic is both extremely rare and extremely dangerous. Accounts of death mages are difficult to verify as very few who see a death mage using their magic live long enough to tell anyone. Hence their powers and sense enhancements are unknown. The king's gold guard is the only fighting force in the kingdom with experience combating death mages so I secured an interview with Donarad Aegis who is a member of the order.
Oh. Just perfect. Donarad was father's name. I didn't know that he was in the gold guard. I looked around the room to make sure I was still alone. He apparently hunted and killed death mages for at least some of his military career. I read further.
He described to me that the death magic was invisible. He told me:
"There is no substance to it. It passes through most armor as if it weren't there. It burns flesh and sickens quickly. Only a powerful life mage can counteract the poison of death's touch and doing so can take weeks of treatment. The armor we wear is specially made and enchanted to resist death magic which lets us fight them."
That was interesting, life mages can heal radiation damage. Of course they probably can't remove irradiated materials so, if someone inhaled radioactive dust, they would need a life mage to constantly be healing the damage it causes. I shuddered at the morbid thought and read on.
I asked him if he could tell us anything more about their power or senses.
"We do not know what their enhanced senses are, they are far too dangerous to be put to the question you see. Some of the older ones we have faced had strange metals that were as heavy as gold. One had made a sword that was red hot like it had just come from a forge fire. It poured death magic off of it in waves. We call these items "death crafts" and their method of creation remains a mystery."
I looked up as I noticed then that someone else had entered the room. Father was standing by the door with his hands folded behind his back. I sat up straight and started sweating. Once he saw me look up he crossed the room.
"I couldn't sleep either." he said.
He pulled a book from the shelf and settled into the chair next to me. I exhaled, trying to hide my relief.
"Do you mind if I ask what you're reading about?" he asked.
I thought of making something up but my brain was slow from lack of sleep. I decided that the topic wasn't all that unusual so I would just tell him the truth.
"I am reading a fascinating interview of a member of the king's gold guard." I said as I showed him the book's title page.
His face flushed a bit and then softened.
"That's… well that was a long time ago." he said.
He was going back to his book when I realized that this was an opportunity to get more information straight from someone who might know a lot about death magic. I thought fast to come up with a question that would tell me what I needed to know.
"I had a nightmare about a death mage in Cinder." I said slowly, which was entirely true. "I guess you would know what would happen if one was found. How would the city respond? … Hypothetically."
He scratched his beard thoughtfully for a while.
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"It depends on how they were discovered." he said finally. "The awakening is normally what gives them away you see. Many people suddenly getting sick with the symptoms of death magic are hard to miss. Once the location of the awakening is identified then we would investigate anyone who has been there."
He stood and went to the small desk in the corner where there was a pitcher of water and a few glasses. After pouring himself a glass he continued.
"Sometimes that works and sometimes not." he explained. "If we can't locate the awakening site quickly, or if a lot of people are getting sick, then we will organize checkpoints and sweeps to identify people with traces of death magic on them. There are some alchemical materials that will glow in the presence of death magic and while they're expensive they aren't hard to make. The Murderer of Deluge was caught by clearing out the whole city in a day and checking everyone with wands made of such materials. Of course, that was after there were thousands of sick and dying people."
A haunted expression crossed his face.
"Son, I have nightmares about death mages too sometimes." he said. "I wish I could console you but they are themselves nightmares. What I can say is that there are processes the legion follows when one is found. They aren't perfect but they work well enough to avoid another disaster like Tor."
"What happened to Tor?" I asked.
He looked surprised and then very sad.
"Tor was a city in the eastern range." he explained. "It was a mining city like Cinder. Forty or so years ago people started getting sick but just a little at first. Then more and more and more. It took about six months before every man, woman and child in the city was somewhere between sick and dead. The whole city had to be abandoned and most of the population died in the end."
I couldn't say anything after that and we both just sat there in silence for a while.
***
0:023 on the 4th day of Winter
This morning's dower conversation with Father was as depressing as it was helpful. People here could test for the presence of radiation and seemed confident that such a test would find a death mage. I needed a way to test for radiation myself to see if I was emitting something detectable. I knew the principles for how a Geiger-Muller counter worked and I might even be able to build one but if I could get ahold of one of these detection wands it would make my job a lot easier. So, I first went looking at the magic item shop where I normally get my supplies. They didn't have one but sent me to a specialty alchemy shop. I got a quote to make one and it ended up being crazy expensive. It turns out that the formula, while simple, used minerals that carry a trace of death magic so they were dangerous to work with. I guess that's something they don't care so much about when there was a death mage on the loose.
That meant I was back to square one with a basic Geiger-Muller counter. I returned to my room to draw up a design. They worked off of the principle that a noble gas was really easy to ionize when it was under a strong electric field. The field would push it to the edge and a stray electron or proton would cause a cascade of electrons to get knocked out of the outer valence shells of the atoms.
"So," I told my assistant Schrodinger. "I need three things to make it work. I needed a high voltage source, argon gas, and a circuit that would roughly allow me to add up how many current pulses were happening over time. Let's take these problems one at a time."
I started scratching his head while I thought out loud.
"The easiest way to make a high voltage source is with a battery." I said, slipping into a lecture voice. "A lead acid battery is extremely simple with only three ingredients: lead, lead-oxide, and sulfuric acid. Lead is used in all sorts of low cost metal work in Cinder so I could get lead plates easily enough, old lead plates that have been left out will have oxidized so I could probably find those too. The general alchemy shop sells sulfuric acid for etching so that won't be a problem either. I think the hardest part might be making a watertight assembly to hold everything and keep each cell apart."
I paused to take a drink of water.
"Perhaps clay jars or maybe something commissioned?" I said. "I bet that someone skilled in ceramics could make something that looks like an ice cube tray. Each cell would be two volts so to get three hundred volts or so I would need about one hundred and fifty cells. If each cell is roughly square then I could imagine something like an eight by eight square chess board a few centimeters deep. I would only need five of those to make the voltage I need."
With that part solved, at least roughly, I drew a diagram in my notebook with a copy of the 'ice-cube' battery tray drawing for the ceramic maker. I would stop by a crafter I have worked with in the past and see what she thought later today.
"The next problem is how to get argon." I said to Schrodinger. I returned to scratching him behind his ears while I puzzled this one out. "Well, on Earth, air is roughly 1% argon so it is common enough but difficult to isolate. Rather than trying to pull argon out maybe it would be easier to pull out nitrogen, oxygen, and CO2"
Schrodinger was purring now and I kept on that line of thought.
"If I ran the same experiment with fire magic in a bottle that Uote and I performed a few days ago then I can put air into a state where all the nitrogen, carbon and oxygen would come apart to form positively charged ions." I explained. "The argon would not form an ion, or at least not for long. That's because it would be the first of everything in the mix to pull a full shell of valence electrons. I could tie another copper wire to a stake in the ground to pull the excess electrons out so I don't have to deal with them. But then how could we pull the positively charged ions out of the bottle?"
I paused to look at Schrodinger.
"Any ideas?" I asked.
"Meow." He said in a terse complaint that I had stopped scratching him.
"That's an interesting idea." I said, returning to scratching. "Cut the bottle in half and suspend it in a large bowl of some alkaline solution, maybe potassium hydroxide, with the air in the bottle exposed to the liquid. The negative ions in solution would bond with any positive ions they see in the bottle's air, pulling them into the liquid phase."
I gave Schrodinger a few more good stretches before stopping to sketch the idea in my notebook.
"Thank you Schrodinger. It's a simple and elegant solution to the problem." I said.
Lastly came the circuit. I had built a lot of circuits in my past life so this one was actually in my wheelhouse. Still, without an amplifier this was going to be tricky. Could I make one? I drew a small metal can on the page, with a rod suspended in its center. The can would be the negative electrode while the rod would be the positive electrode. I would need to separate them with an insulating ceramic ring that would hold the rod in place. I would run copper wire from the can to the pure lead side of the battery as that's the half that oxidizes during use to release excess electrons. Then I would run wire through some sort of detector circuit and to the lead oxide. Once the feed from the argon chamber was suspended between the two electrodes and the whole thing was put in a vacuum the device would act as a triode amplifier.
One downside of this design will be that I don't have any way to recharge the battery once its energy is all used up. Maybe I could find a way to produce a voltage with lightning mana but channels for lighting monsters are extremely rare so I probably can't get a hold of any. The non-magic solution will have to do.
The core of the detector circuit would be a simple coil of copper wire with a lodestone permanent magnet. At first I thought of simply attaching the magnet to a long needle to make an analog meter but then I realized that it wouldn't work. Radiation, and the cascades of current it causes in the charged argon, are extremely inconsistent. I would be looking at a needle jumping around trying to make fine distinctions between relatively small changes.
"What I need is an integrator that adds up the electrical current over time." I told Schrodinger. "But there's no way to do that accurately with this level of technology."
I paced around for a bit trying to think of a way around the problem. Then I realized I was relying too much on electronics and had to think more like a mechanical engineer than an electrical engineer. There is a kind of ratchet gear that only turns in one direction. I knew of a watchmaker with the church of Sol who took commissions. I would connect the lodestone to one of these wheels and display the output on a clock face. I would simply start an calibrated hourglass and count how far the dial moves in that time. That should give me a precise reading of the level of radiation.
The design would probably cost almost all of my savings to actually build but, if it let me detect radiation, it would be totally worth it. It was only mid morning so I would head out to accomplish as much as I could. With any luck I would have a brand new Geiger-Muller counter in just a tenday or so. Schrodinger was napping in a sunbeam that came in through the open window.
"Thanks for all your help today friend." I said.