The fire Elemental ran out of the burning house, calmly handing Hanvol a slew of items that the two fleeing Delphans didn't need anymore, including a purse, a spell component pouch, a Ring, a Wand, a Dagger, and two bottles. It then zipped into a house that wasn't aflame, bashing down the door with one powerful blow and heading inside, leaving a trail of fire that began to build up with great speed.

Hanvol passed the loot over to me without hesitation, knowing I could Identify them by touch alone, if not simply by sight.

I held up the crystal decanter filled with Coral Island rum, shrugged, uncorked it, and offered him a drink of the near-boiling alcohol. A distinctly singular acquired taste, I gathered. I'd have to spend most of the drink on a good cake…

Hanvol took a drink, sloshed it around, and then pursed his lips and blew out a pale blue flame with some amusement, before clearing out his mouth and handing the decanter back. "I'll stick to iced, I think, Lady Edge," he told me gravely.

"How are things proceeding?" I asked Hanvol, watching the fires devour the remnants of Newport neutrally while tucking away our new belongings, dropping the purse and pouch into my Masspack instead of the Portable Hole in my boot. Mixing Holding items with Holes was not a good idea.

I had no great desire to kill the inhabitants, especially the poor, but the fact was that the place was built on a tradition of thievery and smuggling, and the number of Good souls living here was vanishingly low. We'd made offers to most of those and they'd happily headed inland to where our real efforts were being set up.

"The Elementals are pretty happy to wipe everything away," Han assured me, also studying the devastation. You had to have a knowledgeable eye to discern that some of the fires were actually moving of their own volition, and not just with the wind. A house down the block collapsed in a shower of sparks and smoke, and the man-sized fire Elemental inside it leapt to a neighboring building with alacrity, starting the process of bringing down that one, as well. "The attacks are coming through?" he inquired, his eyes indicating he was taking note of where the horde of Elementals he'd Summoned were and directing them to newer targets.

This was great fun for them, and the fire Elementals obeyed him without reservations. Unlike most Zanzyran Elementalists, he didn't abuse those he Summoned, and made a point of compensating them with exotic combustibles, such as custom candles, oil-soaked woods, incense, and similar things they didn't have on their home plane.

As a result, word had gotten around, and any Elementals he Summoned generally came in with a friendly attitude, something few Zanzyran wizards could claim.

"Oh, of course. Briggs hit the strongest force of thieves about an hour ago, took them totally by surprise, and they collapsed quickly. His teams picking off their experienced pickpockets and following them back to their bosses told him a lot about the structure of the local Guild, and the identity of the local master was an open secret."

I didn't know if Sama herself had knifed the rat bastards, or if she instructed one of her students to do so. Irrelevant, in the end. The leadership of the local Thieves Guild had suffered some rather sudden 'deaths by fire' during the chaos going on here.

Getting smoked to death in your own tunnels certainly wasn't on their lists of ways to go, I bet.

Hanvol nodded as we walked through the flaming, smokey city, neither of us bothered by anything here. He was a Fourth-tier Fire Elementalist, and I was a Child of Ice and Fire. This was like a mild sunny day to us. "How complete a rebuild are you intending to do here?" he asked me as the side of a building fell in next to us, spraying cinders and sending a gout of fire and ash into the air. None of it touched us.

"Completely. I want it all ash, the soil overturned, and the basements and tunnels filled in. I'll start from nothing and rebuild that way, much easier to handle."

Vivisizing everything, because I didn't want the dead being charred by the flames rising up to bedevil what we were going to do here, either, and they were just the sort of souls that would try to stick around and make trouble for the living.

A lightning bolt shot into the sky from south of the city, where a few 'noble' estates had been established by the wealthy. "Looks like someone got off an alarm," Hanvol noted dryly. "Either that, or they are really panicking a bit too late."

"Not that it will have much effect on what is happening. Briggs has a lot of reserves to move quietly into position, ambushes set up, and so on. Half of those ships that set to sea aren't going to see land again… or at least their crew and passengers are not."

I'd seen some of his plans, and all the alternatives and reserves behind them. Briggs and Sama knew who they wanted dead, and those people were going to die.

"The Delphan contingent?" Hanvol asked wisely, knowing that empire tended to rather look down on those who killed its official representatives.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

"Mmm." I tilted a mental head at the Markspace chatter. "The families are mostly safe on one of the estates to the west, but most of the family heads have, eh, perished. This last one was a murdercaster for hire, his main subordinate was dealing in slaves of all types for profit. A third was big into yyota fruit sales and creating addicts (I think he was drowned in a vat of his own yyota juice), a fourth was a servant of Delphax and actually started helping the fires along; he ended up with his throat cut by Sama's teams, who were on the lookout for other arsonists taking advantage of the opportunity. Two others hired out as legbreakers for the local guild regularly and couldn't outrun the flames when it was done to them."

Hanvol just nodded. The Thieves' Guild here had controlled every other guild in the city, and employed directly or indirectly half the population, with control of ninety percent of the trade moving through, only the Delphans a somewhat exception to that rule because the thieves didn't want to deal with irked archmages going around frogging them.

Federyn had a similar situation in Marsenpur, which had been selected as a prime training ground for urban combat operatives by Sama on behalf of the Moorish and the new Nulls. The Guild there had been recently buckling under the assaults on its low-level members, crippling its operations significantly. The Moor Corporation had been quietly making inroads during the disruptions, House Gimwall unable to respond fast enough to reclaim its territory.

We shifted course, the road ahead of us blocked by no less than six buildings fallen into the street and flaming away cheerfully, a couple Elemental children capering gleefully about and keeping things going. They waved happily at Hanvol with limbs like tendrils, and he waved kindly back.

Outside the city, a different kind of arson and purging was taking place, as various forces in training and experienced fell upon the very disorganized leadership, military forces, and thieves of Newport, and didn't allow them to get away before they were put to the sword.

Those that did get away would carry stories that someone was making a power play on Newport, which just might piss off two empires, but would certainly be a cautionary tale for anyone wanting to make a move against them.

In the end, a proper display of military power and magical might would satisfy the proclivities of each empire, but would nevertheless result in something that would be seen as a prize asset of both, and thus subject to conquest in return.

After all, there were no equals to them, only rivals and targets for eventual conquest in a world run by Immortals loving grand wars and the drama it brought.

I continued filling in areas below the ground as we strolled along, the substrate below the street here cut by all sorts of crude and unmarked tunnels. Earth Elementals I'd brought in were quietly filling in basements and the like, liberating any precious metals or magical things they found down there, and effectively wiping away everything below-ground so I could start working.

The first thing I was going to have to do was get all the rubble swept aside and burned, but Hanvol's Elementals were doing a good job of seeing that everything was eaten right down to ash, and stone I could just agglomerate as a blob.

The Greens were already drawing up plans for a more advanced settlement, some of the higher-tech stuff carefully out of sight, but with much more advanced plumbing and sewage systems, including water filtration and the like.

The weapon systems they intended to put on the walls were going to be impressive, too. I'd be backing them up with Interdiction and Stillflight zones, so invaders and infiltrators were going to have an interesting time of it, and their vaunted airships and aerial cavalry weren't going to be anything but targets that couldn't approach the walls.

Well, they'd find out in time.

--------

The second day of the fires saw the former inhabitants of the city of Newport gaping in astonishment at what was rising up before them.

The entire area occupied by the city, and a good deal more, was now firmly surrounded by sixty-foot walls of stone, complete with towers, crenelations, archer slits, merlons, gatehouses, and the like.

Heaps of charred rubble had been shoved outside the walls in great broken mounds of dark ash and char, burning down even now by smoldering flames in the center, crackling and crushing downwards as they were slowly eaten away into ever-deepening mounds of ash.

Some industrious souls rowed out into the stinking harbor, still contaminated by the sewage of the city, and looked at the city from out in the bay.

The walls weren't so high, but they still existed there, and all the piers and docks had burned away, even the charred pilings gone and nowhere to be seen.

Newport had been well and truly wiped off the land, and nothing remained of it but piles of scrap that were being burned slowly and thoroughly away.

But who or what had replaced them? There weren't any flags proudly declaring victory or the land they'd taken. Just the cold gray walls, rising up there and remaining silent.

They couldn't even see any soldiers or others patrolling the tops of them! Of course, that led to some overly bored souls daring one another to climb them, until one overeager and very confident young fool named Jako the Quick decided to take a run at them.

The stones were extremely smooth, fit together with impossible symmetry, and had no cracks that Jacko could put his fingers into or work from.

The crowd watched him tap in a spike to work with, nothing appearing up top to dissuade him, and then he froze.

When Jacko didn't move for a long minute, one of his mates who had dared him to climb, a skinny fellow named Sly Louie, crept closer, wondering what was wrong.

When Louie touched his friend's shoulder and walked around the front of him, he was terrified to see his cocky buddy had been turned to stone!

Then Louie noticed his own hand had turned gray and wasn't releasing Jacko's shoulder!

He screamed in shock and terror, but nothing was moving as the gray stone crept up his body under his clothes, and the whole crowd watched him turn to gray stone, too.

The crowd promptly screamed in fear and stampeded away from the wall, not wanting to be sucked into whatever the effect was that had just petrified two of them.

An hour later, when someone crept back, wondering what had happened to the two of them, they found both statues were missing, but two bas-relief pictures were proudly displayed at the base of the walls, which looked amazingly like the two young thieves…

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