It turns out I don't like negotiating.

I could understand why Dael was being pedantic with the terms, he was entrusting his people to my care and in this world the strongest could do whatever they had the strength to get away with. Raping his people, getting them killed in battles, enslaving them and selling them to others, were all concerns he raised as things that should be ensured against in the treaty. He even mentioned eating his people at one point, which I guess was possibly relevant, people eat quite a few of the animal species that they represented. After some time I stopped him and turned to Mal'Thorn.

"Your treaty was much simpler." I said. "Why is there a need for all of this complication?"

"Usually treaties are negotiated." Mal'Thorn said. "As the stronger party we offered our initial conditions, and then you as the weaker party would negotiate for what you required. You accepted without negotiating, I believed for two reasons. The first was that our terms gave you what you needed already, a claim to the land, and the rights to cut down trees. We have negotiated treaties with many peoples and almost all of them require trees as building materials, so it is better for us to include that provision up front."

Well... I wasn't aware at the time that it was a negotiation. Though I didn't know of anything I needed from them, so it probably wouldn't have changed anything.

"The second reason." He said. "Was that you didn't see yourself as the weaker party. I saw it as a show of strength, you didn't need any assurances that we weren't going to harm you as our subject because you could defend yourself from anything we could do. An impression that was justified from what I have since seen of you. Dael, and his people, are definitely the weaker party, and so they would seek some assurances of their continued safety as your vassal while there is a neutral third party of some strength that could help them leave if the terms of the treaty were unacceptable."

So, it came down to my not being a bastard. And I should have stated terms to begin with.

"Let us begin again." I said to Dael. "I offer you a safe place in return for your aid in growing enough food to support the other residents of my fortress. What do you require in order to fulfil your side of the treaty?"

"Soil, at least half a meter deep." Dael said. "And enough land to grow the amount of food you require."

"Done." I said.

"Access to fresh water." Dael said.

"Done." I said.

"Mana crystals for sunlight enchantments." Dael said.

"Done." I said. "In any amount that would be useful to you."

"Some rooms or houses for my people." Dael said.

"Done." I said.

"I accept this treaty, on behalf of my people." Dael said. "A safe place in return for our aid in growing enough food to support the residents of your fortress."

That was it, apparently. A verbal agreement. I looked to Mal'Thorn and raised an eyebrow.

"Treaties are magically binding." He said, understanding my query.

"Well, let's go see your new home." I said.

We headed up the stairs, the rest of the beast people following. Hmm, I might need to put handrails on the stairs. The beast people started going up the center of the stairs in single file, despite them being two meters wide.

Chantelle met us at the platform at the top of the stairs.

"Greetings Dael." Chantelle said.

"Greetings Chantelle Warder." Dael said. "The Warders are here? We feared you were all taken or killed."

Chantelle looked pained. "Just me, so far." She said.

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"Come inside." I said, leading them into the fortress.

I wanted to keep the first floor for utilities, so I took them straight to the second floor. It was circular, as all of the floors in my fortress are, sixty meters wide, though the walls were curved and the ceiling made a circle that was only forty five meters wide. It gave over eleven thousand square meters of floor space.

I spun up a quick model of a dwelling, a four meter by four meter cube with thirty centimeter thick walls to the ceiling four and a half meters up. A thirty centimeter thick floor with the top at the three meter mark, and then stairs up. Leave holes for doorways, and it should work fine, a public area below and a private area above.

I made a seven by seven grid of them around a large entrance hall around the stairway, leaving about half of the floor for fields. I would need eight thousand cubic meters of material to make the soil and build the buildings. The equivalent of a cube twenty meters on each side. It sounded like a lot, but I could manage that in three trips. From beneath the fortress seems like the best place to get it, I'd just seal the hole I made in the walls when I was done.

"I'll be going to get the material I need to fill the area with soil, and build some houses." I said. "Is there anything you need before I go?"

"Some mana crystals so that we can start enchanting lights?" Dael asked.

"And some medium mana crystals for me." Chantelle said. "I can set up a relay so that any enchantments they do can be powered by the central mana crystal. That way they won't have to refill the enchantments manually."

She passed me her small mana crystal and I started with a dozen small mana crystals, and a dozen medium ones.

"Put a relay on each floor?" I asked Chantelle, who nodded. "What is the difference between a ward and an enchantment, by the way?"

"A ward projects a field." Chantelle said. "While an enchantment affects an object."

I nodded. "Keep the area immediately around the stairs clear." I said. "I will be pushing stone in front of me when I come back up."

With the mana crystals done I headed down the stairs to the bottom of the fortress. I cut another stairway down through the reinforced stone of my walls, and continued it down when I got to ordinary stone, storing all of the reinforced stone on the bottom floor of the fortress to be replaced in the breach when I was done.

It would actually be easier to move the material as soil, that way I could push it around in a flow like water, rather than in chunks of stone.

I dug the stairs further down until I got to twenty meters below my walls, then converted all of the stone within reach of my power into soil. It ended up being less dense than the stone I was converting from, and I had to push it up the stairs to fill the bottom floor of the fortress. I had around three thousand cubic meters of soil at the limit that I could move with my power, and I started walking it up the stairs. I had to push it up one floor at a time, the bottleneck of the stairs limiting my range somewhat.

When I got back to the second floor I was met by an extremely bright light. It was the first time I'd seen sunlight, and it was far brighter than I was expecting. After checking that nothing was needed from me, I pushed the soil out to the edges of the floor, stacking it up evenly to half a meter high before heading back down for another load.

I built stairs further down, digging a forty meter wide cylinder out under my fortress rather than digging horizontally. Another two trips and I had all of the material I needed up on the second floor.

We had to move the beast people out into what would become the fields while I built the buildings around the stairway. A large entrance hall, a cube twelve meters on each side, directly over the stairs. It gave the beast people a point of access where they could meet outsiders. The hall was surrounded by the two story dwellings I'd designed. At three layers deep away from the hall, with spaces left for hallways, there were fifty nine dwellings. Enough for the current population, which included couples and families.

With soil and housing done, I just needed to provide access to water. I got together with the beast person enchanter, a bearded goat woman, and worked out an enchantment that would act as a tap. Activate the tap to varying degrees, and it would push a stone plug out of a pipe to allow varying amounts of water through. Which allowed both running water to the dwellings, and a sprinkler system on the roof above the fields.

I just needed to put a water tank on the first floor and pipes through the stone. I made it a fifteen meter by fifteen meter tank, from floor to ceiling, and placed it next to the wall. It needed some reinforcement, but it could hold the full capacity of a million litres of water. I made a matching capacity waste water tank on the floor below them.

Filling the water tank required another trip down for raw material. I would need to refill the water tank about monthly, but I could get most of the matter for that from converting the waste water two floors down into clean water. I created a large return pipe going from the floor above the beast people's floor to the one below it that would be used as a return.

With all of that done, the only thing remaining was to attach the enchanted sun crystals to the roof above the fields. The beast people had been busy speed-growing vines into doors for the doorways. They were just finishing the main doors between the stairs and the entrance hall when I was leaving. Vines were gripping the stone around the doorway, and were anchoring the vines hanging down and across it.

I was admiring how well the vine-doors sealed the doorway when the relay crystal at the stairs started tolling deeply, and I could hear more of them up and down the stairway. Chantelle rushed past me to the stairs, the vines curling back to let her through.

"That's the detection ward." She said. "I hooked the alarm up to the relay crystals."