Examining the taint, however, had started him thinking on ways to detect the presence of a DragonCrown fragment. If what Rym had suggested was true, then anyone attempting to hide a fragment would be looking to cancel or fool spells sent out to detect the fragment. The defending spell would either have to conceal the fragment from the seeking spell, or would have to overpower the seeking spell and report back negative results.
The key thing to either of those approaches on the defensive side was that they had to recognize the seeking spell before they could defeat it. In his discussion with Rym, he had come up with all manner of dimensions to spells that would make them identifiable. The easiest one for a seeking spell would be its very nature. Seeking spells sought targets, then reported back with results. How long that took, and how good the results were, depended on a lot of factors. Often it took time, and the resulting information was less than useful.
Kerrigan had hoped that detection spells taught by the Caledo Academy would be significantly different from those on Vilwan., but they were almost identical. The spell created a general template that used information the caster put into it, then went out in the world and looked for something that matched. If Kerrigan wanted to find a cat, for example, he’d imagine a cat and would cast the spell. The more details he filled in, like age, name, hair color, scars, gender, and such, the more likely he’d get a perfect match.
Casting that spell, though, would overwhelm him with cat reports, and even if the specific cat he wanted was located, the time it took to report back could well mean that the cat had moved away and could never be found without more spells and a lot of searching.
Kerrigan noted an inherent flaw with detection spells and was pretty certain someone else must have noticed it before. If they had, however, they’d not fashioned a spell to take care of that problem. The flaw was this: the spells were slow and clumsy because they sought every object and checked it against the template, then evaluated how closely the thing matched. If it matched on enough of the parameters, the spell would report back that it had found the target. Thus, a statue of a black cat might fulfill the parameters of a search for a black cat, especially if the wizard forgot to include “alive” as an aspect he was searching for.
What Kerrigan had in mind to develop was a search spell that moved more quickly. What he would do was order the parameters he was looking for, and reject items immediately when they failed to match a parameter. For a DragonCrown fragment he would start with rejecting anything that was not magickal in nature, then anything that did not include a gemstone, anything that was of insufficient weight, and anything that was less than seven centuries old. In effect he would be turning search spells inside out and he hoped that would allow him to find the hidden fragments because concealment spells would not recognize the nature of his spell and react to it.
Even better than that, though, he decided to make the reporting back more exact. Once the spell had a match, it would trigger a secondary spell. The spell would shoot out two—Kerrigan wasn’t totally sure what to call them and wished Will was around because he’d have a good word for them—two heralds. Each herald would go a half mile north or south of the target, then vector in at him. Because they would travel at a known rate of speed, and each would include vector and time information when it reported back, Kerrigan would be able to calculate how far away the item was and the exact location. Best yet, since the heralds would not contain information about the target per se, any spells cast to prevent such information from getting out—such as a spell that overwhelmed the detection spells and made them report back a lack of detection—would be powerless to stop them.
He didn’t yet have all the details worked out on the casting. The heralds were ready to go, but setting up the hierarchy of match parameters and making that work was difficult. He felt fairly certain he’d have it ready to go inside a week, and would cast it toward Oriosa to see if the red fragment was still there.
Kerrigan smiled and sighed happily. He hoped Rym Ramoch would be pleased with his progress. It’s one step closer to stopping Chytrine, and if that does not make him happy, little else will.
55
For General Markus Adrogans, the battle made no sense. There, in the distance, barely a dozen miles away, lay Svarskya. He’d remembered it as a shining city of tall towers and stout walls, but now it sprawled broken and blackened, with smoke rising as if a siege had already shattered the defenders. In the harbor beyond it lay a fleet of ships, and he suspected they’d brought reinforcements.
In pushing north along the river road to the capital, he had progressed cautiously. More troops came in from the Guranin Highlands to garrison the Three Brothers. The highlanders had greatly enjoyed that idea, and the clans negotiated hard to get the tower they thought the most storied. Once he had his rear secure and his troops rested, he headed north and sent General Caro with the Alcidese Horse Guards ahead for reconnaissance in force, while the elves and Beal mot Tsuvo’s people fanned out through the countryside.
Between the Three Brothers and Svarskya itself there lay only one good battleground where the Aurolani could hope to stop him shy of the city. The valley that the river had cut through the mountains spread out into vast coastal plains. To avoid the marshlands to the east, the road crossed the Svar River over a massive bridge. Known as the Svar Bridge, it had been constructed with fortifications at either approach, which would make it easy to hold against attack.
Caro and his heavy cavalry battalion arrived to find the bridge only lightly defended. Though infantry support would be days coming, Caro bravely took the bridge and made ready to hold it. Once word came back to the main body of troops that the Horse Guards were holding the bridge, the Alcidese King’s Heavy Guards infantry regiment requested and received permission to hurry ahead to support their countrymen.
Gyrkyme scouts and messengers had continuously flown back and forth to keep Adrogans informed, but the majority of their messages indicated that nothing was happening. Then, when Adrogans and the main body of troops were but a day away, the Aurolani marched a light infantry regiment south and staged a first attack on the bridge.
The Alcidese repulsed the attack easily. While they only did light damage to the enemy—estimated at less than a hundred killed or wounded—their casualties were even fewer. The Aurolani troops withdrew, then more troops headed south from the city, including a battalion of light cavalry on frost-claws and a regiment of heavy infantry including some hoargoun and the kryalniri.
What surprised and amazed Adrogans was that the Aurolani had positioned themselves farther north than necessary and had let the sunken road split their east wing from the main body of their formation. The east wing was then trapped between the road and the river, seriously limiting their ability to do much at all. Moreover, the Aurolani position allowed Adrogans to send his own troops across the bridge and form them up in broad lines.
The Aurolani were inviting him to engage in a set-piece battle, where he had the advantage in both numbers and terrain. The only way that would have made sense was if they had dragonels with them. That weapon’s destructive capability could have done serious damage to his troops in formation, but without them, the outnumbered Aurolani forces were doomed.
Adrogans surveyed the battlefield. From the bridge, the land began a gradual descent through the plains to the city. Snow covered the ground, but it could not hide the depression made by the road as it cut its way through the landscape. Where the land swelled, the road might be as much as ten feet deep, and all but on the level with the surrounding terrain, but here it was a five-foot-deep gulf choked with snow snaking a white line through the Aurolani formation.