Book 3, Chapter 53

The reaction was immediate and violent. Spells exploded into the air from both mages, one casting some form of force restraint designed to latch onto me and hold me still, the other a long, spinning shard of ice with enough speed behind it to punch through armor and skewer a man.

The dims weren’t slow to attack either. They already had naked steel in their hands, and they waded in behind the spells, ready and willing to finish me off if I managed to survive the first attack. Two of them with short spears were already thrusting the deadly tips of their weapons in my direction.

I broke apart the force restraint spell before it got close to me. The ice lance flashed through the intervening space, only to be casually flung aside as I backhanded it. Of course, it was actually my shield ward that truly deflected the spell, but I didn’t want it shooting off at some random angle and skewering someone on accident. If anyone here was going to die, it was going to be because I decided to kill them.

The ice lance unraveled as it flew off to the side, its mana spent in the brief few seconds it existed. I unleashed a minor force wave, just big enough to pick people up and throw them back a few feet, to stop the charging dims from closing in on me and needling my shield ward’s mana supply, and then said, “There’s no need to get violent. I’m not here to apprehend you.”

The mage who’d thrown the ice lance snarled and spun up another spell, but tendrils of my own mana reached through his shroud to break it apart. The other mage, apparently the smarter of the two, had noticed the dome of silence we were surrounded by and held off on taking another shot at me.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“That’s not important right now,” I said. “Just know that I’m not associated with the Sanctum of Light in any way. I’m more of what you’d call an independent mage.”

I didn’t dare try to read the minds of these two mages, not when they were so obviously proficient in magical combat, but there were seven dims right there who would presumably have some useful information for me. Getting them to think about what I wanted to know was a large part of the reason I’d approached them openly, so that I could ask questions and steal the answers right out of their heads.

The other part was that they were only a few minutes out from the teleportation platform and obviously focused on their mission, so I doubted I’d get much useful information if I’d just shadowed them and skimmed their surface thoughts. This way, I had a chance to direct the conversation where I wanted it to go and kept them from ruining my own element of surprise later.

“Hold,” the smart mage said when the dims started trying to close back in. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of them stopped on command. I would have thought one or two would have been itching to put a length of steel through me, but apparently, whoever these people were, they were more disciplined than I’d given them credit for.

The leader studied me in the dark, though I knew that was no hindrance to him. I could see the mana pooling in his eyes and recognized the structure that would give him the ability to see through the shadows. That was an intermediate-tier spell, and it looked like his version was on the more efficient side of things. This man could have been part of the Wolf Pack, easily one of the strongest mages on my home island.

Perhaps that was giving him too much credit. If he lived around here, he had access to plentiful mana. It would be foolish to expect the same quality of mage around the tower as I’d found back home. Regardless of his advantages, however, he was still one of the most powerful mages I’d met in my new life.

“Why are you attacking the teleportation platform?” I asked. My mind reading spells were already in place; I just hoped the dims knew enough of what was going on to feed me something useful.

“Who says we were?” the mage shot back.

“There’s not much else here worth going after, certainly not for nine people out for blood. Were you going to kill the mage on duty?”

That part, at least, the dims had an answer for. They already had a plan both for attacking the mage and for hiding the body. It wasn’t a very good plan, just some simple earth manipulation to dig a hole big enough to dump their victim into, but it was a plan.

An ugly expression flitted across the mage’s face. “You’re obviously a good mage,” he said. “I can tell. Extraordinary mana control, too good to be self-taught. Too confident. You’re either powerful or you’re a fool, and I don’t think you’re that stupid. But we have business here, and it doesn’t involve you. Move along, stranger, and let us be on our way.”

There was an unsaid ‘or else’ at the end of that sentence. The dims shifted uneasily, picking up that they might be fighting again at any moment, but far more hesitant about charging at me now. That was smart of them, smarter than the second mage who thought he was sneakily building up a powerful conjuration behind his mana shroud.

I lashed out with a single tendril of mana, cutting through the second mage’s shroud and shredding his still-forming spell. “None of that, now. We’re still having a polite conversation,” I said without turning to look at the man. To the leader, I said, “If I let you attack that platform, you’ll be disrupting my own plans.”

“Your plans?” the mage asked, now confused. “Why should we care about your plans? You’re not a Breaker.”

“I don’t know what that is,” I said. “And you should care because I’m not going to let you disrupt my plans. Your best option right now is to find a way to work with me so everyone walks away happy, because the only other option is that I walk away slightly annoyed and you don’t walk away at all.”

Both mages bristled at that and prepared to attack me again, but the leader kept a level head. “A Breaker is what those assholes in the tower call a child of the dark,” he said. “And if you’re not with them, then why are you here?”

“Because I want to go into the tower myself. I’m not authorized to, and I don’t need your own antics making it harder for me to sneak by myself, later.”

“You’d be caught and killed immediately. Those bigots don’t tolerate anyone from the outside being anywhere near their home.”

“And yet, you’re going there,” I pointed out.

From what I could tell, that was because Breakers, more fully known as Breakers of Chains, were actually from the tower. They seemed to be some sort of anarchist faction trying to bring down the Sanctum’s government, specifically its aristocracy. The dims were representatives from different villages the Breakers had established communication with in an attempt to increase their numbers, and their assistance had been bought with promises of igniting their cores and teaching them magic.

It'd be hypocritical of me to judge anyone for bartering that knowledge away, considering how many times I’d done the exact same thing. I wasn’t sure if the Breakers actually planned to fulfil their end of the bargain, and neither were three of the dims, but the opportunity was too good for them to pass by.

“We know where we’re going. We have objectives. We can blend in. We have help waiting for us on the other side,” the mage said. “What were you going to do? Just stroll in and kill anyone who tries to stop you? I don’t care how good you are, you’re not winning a fight against a hundred sentinels.”

I actually hadn’t been planning on doing any of that. I’d assumed there were protections on the platform to prevent its use by anyone who wasn’t authorized, so I’d mostly just wanted access to it to begin with. My hope had been to decipher enough of the wards to figure out how to bypass the ones on the tower itself. I’d then teleport myself in at my leisure and find a secure location to hole up in.

The mental link the leader established with the rest of his group was so smoothly done that I almost missed it. I had an instant to consider whether to pull my mind reading spell out of the dims’ minds or to leave it and hope the leader wouldn’t realize I was in there before he issued his first order.

‘Attack on my signal. Spells first, then long weapons,’ the leader sent to them.

I had to admit, the look on his face when he realized I was picking up on the telepathic link he’d just established made me laugh. It was one part incredulity, one part fear, one part annoyance, all mixed together in an improbably combination.

“Fuck,” was all the leader said.

“Indeed.”

“What’s wrong?” the second mage asked.

“This guy’s in their heads already. Who knows how much he’s learned, could be anything.”

“Not as much as you might think. Your operational security is impressive. I suppose you’ve got plenty of experience with dealing with mind reading spells, being residents of that tower yourself,” I said.

“So what now?” the mage asked. “You don’t sound like you’re going to remove yourself from our business. But if we start fighting, all it takes is the battle moving outside this silence shell you’ve built around us and your hopes of not raising the alarm are gone anyway. Seems we’re at a stand-off.”

“How time-sensitive is your mission?” I asked.

“Very,” the mage said flatly.

They were already planning to go in violently, so the element of surprise probably wasn’t as valuable to them as it was to me. The best option I could see for me was to kill all nine of them, remove the bodies, and vacate the town before anyone noticed. Despite what the leader seemed to think, I had no doubt I could accomplish that before anyone managed to escape the confines of my silencing magic.

That was a short-term solution, however. From what I’d learned about the children of the dark, or the Breakers of Chains, as they called themselves, they would be far more willing to look for and accept outside assistance than the established nobility would. If I was going to find allies inside the tower, it was almost certainly going to be these people.

“Perhaps a bit of cooperation,” I said. “I’ll help you get in unnoticed if you can delay your departure by half an hour.”

“What would be the point?” the mage asked.

“It gives me time to study the platform and determine its access key. It gives you a better chance of landing on the other side before an alarm sounds.”

They were considering my offer, if for no other reason than because they didn’t want to fight me here on the streets. Even though it looked like they were confident they’d win, neither mage figured they’d take me down quietly. The dims were more concerned about dying in the fight, which showed an uncommon amount of good sense, in my opinion, and weren’t eager to engage me again now that things had calmed down.

“Looks like we don’t have much of a choice,” the mage said with a grimace. “How are you going to get all of us in unnoticed?”

“Oh, that won’t be an issue. I’ve been studying the building’s wards for days now. I just had other prep work to finish before I made my move,” I said.

“Fine. Let’s see it in action,” the mage said. Telepathically, he added, ‘Be prepared to go back to the plan for the sentinel if this doesn’t go smoothly.’

I ignored that. The mage knew I was still scanning the minds of the dims, but he probably assumed I was wasting a bunch of mana doing it. That was good. It might bait him into trying to betray me if he thought I was exhausted – better to find out now if that was how it was going to be.

“By the way,” I said, “What’s your name?”

“Nelgith,” the leader grunted. “You?”

“Keiran.”

Nobody else offered up introductions, not that I blamed them.

“Alright,” I said. “First of all, we need some better cover than these weak anti-scrying charms you’re all using…”