Jake's Justice, Book Three of Wizards (30 page)

I was just thanking the gods that they wouldn’t have trumpeters when they sounded up. Wishful thinking on my part, given the amount of royalty present in the room.

Esmeralda nearly knocked me over. Well, the girl weighs a bit these days and I wasn’t expecting her to be so eager. It took a few minutes to pry her off me and speak to the assembled royalty.

“I am sorry, your graces, but you have had a wasted trip. Salice has more than enough food to see us through the winter.”

“Jake…” the King said warningly.

“You may have noticed the extra moon we have in the sky. It is here at my bidding and will soon provide all the food we need.”

There was a stunned silence. Esmeralda was the first to recover.

“The negotiations are concluded. May I thank the King of Frode for his kind offer to feed our people in exchange for the Kingdom and to the Kings of Dentor and Alegon for their equally generous offers? Should any of your kingdoms suffer similar calamities, you may have no doubt that we will remember what happened here today.”

“You are taking the word of this… fool?” the King of Frode asked in an outraged voice. “Make no mistake, our offer is withdrawn and your people will starve as a result.”

My King and father-in-law frowned at me. Still unsure that I could deliver what I had promised. I smiled reassuringly back at him, which didn’t seem to work.

“I think I already said the negotiations are concluded,” Esmeralda said archly. “If the delegations of Frode, Dentor and Alegon would kindly leave the room; we have much to discuss with the Lord Wizard.”

There were mutterings and grumbles, but the delegations made their way out of the Ballroom leaving a dozen or so members of the Kings Cabinet and my wives.

Esmeralda glared at me.

“I have never been so glad to see anyone in my life. Those dogs were planning to strip us of everything, including our freedom. However, if you can’t deliver on your words, Jake Morrissey I am going to skin you alive, because women and children will starve to death.”

I grinned. This was going to be fun.

30.
      
Reparations

In my timeline it was only a couple of days ago that I left the Fedre base having turned down the Colonel’s offers of reparation. I’d hopped to my bedroom to catch my breath when it occurred to me that there was a way they could help. I hopped back before the Colonel had a chance to move.

He raised his eyebrows. “Did you forget something?”

“How did your men get to Salice? You people don’t use magic.”

I could see the wheels turning in his head as he tried to work out where I was going with this. “The world where we engaged you is at the edge of Fedre territory. I suspect that is why we were chosen in the first place. My men used a small fast courier ship, which is probably still circling your planet waiting for them to call in.”

“Salice is short of food for the winter. Much of this year’s crops were destroyed before they could be harvested. Can you provide emergency food supplies?”

The Colonel pursed his lips. “How many million people are involved? It will take time to mobilize supplies if the number is more than ten. For smaller numbers than that we can send immediate help.” He made a gesture and images appeared in the air in front of him. “We can get initial supplies to that world in a little over sixty days.”

“There are far less than a million people involved.”

“And this is what you want in reparations?”

I sighed. “Not for me. This will be reparations for Captain Cari. He died saving my life and he deserved better.”

The Colonel gave me a surprised look. “You really aren’t the run of the mill wizard, are you? Let’s go to my office and see if we can sort it out.”

Queen Janti patted my hand as I finished the story. “We shall make sure that everyone knows who they have to thank for their salvation. Wilhelm would gladly have sacrificed his life for the good of his people and this is fitting.”

“This ship has been hovering over us for weeks,” Esmeralda snapped angrily. “How do we get it to deliver its cargo?”

I knew she wasn’t really angry. It was just a reaction to the tears in her eyes. She didn’t want to give in to them. I gave her hand a squeeze and she glared at me.

“They are waiting for a signal. We need to find a field near to the city and on a main road. Remember we will need to move the supplies out to where they are needed.”

A couple of minutes later we had a map out and Esmeralda drew a circle around a large area about a mile beyond the city wall.

“Do you think you can find it?” she asked. “Perhaps we should wait until morning?”

I checked my reserves and found I had enough magic. “Best to do it now so we can start unloading it first thing tomorrow.” I still had a few surprises up my sleeve and wanted to do the first bit under the cover of darkness.

It’s amazing how well I know the skies above Salice. I’ve spent a lot of time in the air there, either flying solo or with Fluffy. Hopping to about a quarter of a mile above the city I was shocked at how cold it was outside. I wrapped a cloak of warmth around me and used the moonlight to locate the field Esmeralda marked on the map. A circle of fire with a cross through it blazed into existence, the agreed signal.

As the ship descended I got some idea of the scale of it. Over a mile long, a quarter of a mile thick and nearly three quarters of a mile wide, Colonel Mantoyot had described this vessel as a small cargo carrier. It made me wonder what a big one looked like. Lights dotted its hull making it look more like a big Christmas decoration than a space ship.

I hovered far enough away from it not to be a hazard to shipping. The vessel stopped its downward descent a few hundred yards above the snow covered field. A square central element of the ship began to move down as the cargo hold separated from the ship proper. Spotlights on the ship reflected off the snow and illuminated the cargo section. It was three hundred yards to a side and was made of the same gleaming metal as the ship.

When it completely separated from the ship I estimated its height at three hundred feet. It continued to descend slowly, not attached to anything I could see. The air distorted around it and snow flew from under it as it landed gently. It sank another twelve feet into the ground under its own weight before coming to rest.

A panel in the wall next to the road opened five or six feet above the ground. The panel swung out on massive hinges to form a gentle ramp from the ground up to enormous metal doors.

The ship flashed blue and red lights at me and then began to float upwards. I dropped down to the doors to look above them. What I saw made me smile.

After an excellent meal with the King and Queen we retired to the apartments. Jenny wanted to stay on Salice to see what the Fedre had sent, so she was going to spend the night in our apartments in the Palace. I quickly hopped her over to her parents so she could explain it to them, dropping in on my parents to say hello on the journey back.

We sat up talking in bed for hours. Esmeralda and Jenny were concerned about Anna. Urda had not been seen for days. I was sure it would all sort itself out when I had the chance to help.

There was a loud knock at the bedroom door just after the sun had risen.

“Come in,” I shouted.

Ella slid into the room, opening the door just enough to allow her entry. She shut it and held her hand over her eyes, looking nervous even by her standards.

“It’s okay, we’re decent.”

I could have added that the only way I could get out of bed was to hop. My wives had trapped me on both sides with their bodies and an arm over me. Given their current phase of pregnancy, there was no way I could leave the bed in any conventional matter.

Ella parted her fingers to look and began to giggle.

“S,s,s,sorry, m,my L,l,lord Wizard, b,b,but you do look funny.”

I would have hopped out of the bed, but I was naked and didn’t want to give the girl a heart attack.

“Did you wake me up for a reason?”

“The K,k,king requests you to attend b,b,breakfast with him.”

Ella looked at me enquiringly.

“Tell him we’ll be down soon.”

She made no attempt to leave the room.

“Well?” I asked.

“D,d,does the Lord Wizard need assistance to get out of bed?”

That did it. I hopped and stood before her hands on hips in my full naked glory.

For a few moments, Ella continued to stand and I watched her eyes scan up and down my body, lingering in the down part for a surprising length of time. Then she remembered herself and shrieked, fleeing the room.

“Stop frightening the servants,” Esmeralda mumbled from the bed.

“I know how she feels,” Jenny said as she sat up. “It certainly scared me the first time I saw it.”

“We are wanted downstairs,” I pointed out. Then I had to stifle giggles as my ladies struggled to get out of bed. I did think of adding a commentary,
animal documentary style,
about two beached whales, but thought better of it.

I like riding. Horses had been prepared for us, along with a cavalry escort, and we made our way through the streets of the city and out towards the field where the storage unit had landed. A carriage had been provided for my wives who were in no condition to ride.

We were not alone when we arrived. At least half of the people of the city were already out there, the closest standing a good thirty feet from the building, just in case.

And that was the way to think of it, as a building. Five or six stories high, it dominated the landscape. In daylight, I saw that its metal was almost white and shone bright where the sun bounced off it. The ramp to the doors was rough to provide extra grip. The horses seemed happy enough to walk on it and the carriage rode up onto it to stop by the doors.

“Oh that is beautiful,” Jenny said as she saw the giant gold colored sign above the doors. ‘
The Wilhelm Cari Storehouse’
Below it in smaller letters the following message was written:
‘The food in this building is supplied by the Fedre in honor and memory of Captain Wilhelm Cari, who laid down his life for his people.’

I had insisted on that message and written it out for them so it would be in the right language and spelled correctly.

“How do we open the doors?” Esmeralda asked.

There was a plate at the side of the door. I tapped it and a keypad appeared. I tapped the symbols in the sequence the Colonel had given me and the outline of a green hand appeared on the pad.

“Put your right hand over the outline,” I instructed the King. A few seconds after he did it the hand symbol flashed. “Now Queen Janti.” She also did as instructed and I asked Esmeralda to complete the sequence. The doors slid open revealing delivery chutes and control panels. Before they could go forward I stepped in front of them.

“I need to explain something to you. These doors will slide shut unless one of the three of you is within a hundred feet of this door. From now on the only way for the doors to open is for one of you to place your hand on that panel. Though I don’t want you to dwell on why I’m saying this, your hand needs to be connected to your body and you must be alive.”

The King nodded, though the Queen looked surprisingly distressed. “May I ask why?”

“The Colonel explained the dangers of dropping a food supply like this into an agrarian culture like yours. The food in here could be used to stop all farming for five or six years, the population levels would rise and eventually starvation would follow. You have to use this place only when you need to. It will store any kind of food indefinitely and you can put food in as well as take it out. The systems in it will last for at least a thousand years.”

Esmeralda smiled. “I doubt that I shall be around in a thousand years.”

“Really? I thought you planned to rule forever,” I replied and smiled back her. There were other secrets to this building, but now was not the time to tell.

The King had been looking at the instructions beside each chute. I’d taught one of the Colonel’s aides the Salician language, but there were also instructive pictures. A clever child could operate this building.

The king waved over the new Captain of the Guard and began giving orders. Soon a line of citizens were queuing to receive sacks of flour and strange square chunks of meat wrapped in plastic. There were vegetables and fruit in the store, but people were giving these a miss for the life sustaining stuff.