Book 3, Chapter 37

Ivetra reacted first. Mana flared as she wove a flame lance into existence and snapped out, “Igla Descarus.”

Just before the spell ignited, I reached out tendrils of my own mana to break apart her magic’s structure. Both mages had an instant to react to my counterspell, but neither of them were quick enough. Ivetra’s attack fizzled out, and I raised an eyebrow at her.

“Would you like to try again?” I asked mildly.

Both of them started casting at the same time, but I blocked the spells from forming. Aphrona chained three more casts after that, each time casting quicker, but there were only a few feet of space between us. My mana slapped apart her attempts before they could even get started. While I was dealing with her attempts to tie up my concentration, Ivetra started building her next attack inside her mana core.

“Careful,” I warned. “If that backfires, you’ll rupture your core.”

Then I jabbed a needle of mana into her, puncturing her core and shifting the spell structure to destabilize it. It wasn’t enough to break the spell completely, but Ivetra gasped in sudden fear and struggled to hold it together.

“Maybe you should break it back down before you hurt yourself,” I told her as I cracked apart another of Aphrona’s spells. “Look, I’m really not interested in hurting you. It’s like fighting children. We don’t need to do this.”

“You might win, but we won’t go down without a fight,” Ivetra snarled. Abandoning any attempt at casting a spell, she flung herself at me. Halfway there, my shield ward reacted to her attack and slapped her aside to bounce off the wall of the cabin. The whole wagon shook from the impact, and she laid there, dazed.

I used the opportunity to slap her with a mana drain, not that I needed the pitiful amount of mana left in her. My purpose was both to keep her from attacking me and from hurting herself like she’d nearly done by trying to cast a spell inside her core. It also served the purpose of unsettling Aphrona, who could sense her friend’s mana vanishing and knew exactly what had happened.

“That’s… that’s impossible,” she said, gawking at Ivetra. I silently applauded her focus, because not only did she keep casting, but she even ramped up her speed and split her mana to cast two spells at once.

The first spell was the bigger one, a powerful force bolt strong enough to break a human body in two. That was the distraction, meant to tie me up for a moment while her second spell cut the wards around the wagon. I wasn’t sure if that was so that she could call for help or if she was planning on bursting out the side and fleeing, but either way, I countered both spells. There was no reason to let the fight escape the confines of this nice little sound-proof box.

I considered trying a mana drain on Aphrona as well, but it wasn’t a spell that generally worked on mages. It wasn’t a matter of a power difference either, just that the target had to have exceptionally poor mana control for the spell to be effective. Any novice mage could fight it off, providing they hadn’t just been knocked senseless.

I could use kinetic force to strike Aphrona and hope to replicate what I’d done with Ivetra, but it hardly felt necessary. At the rate she was going, she’d empty her own core out in a handful of spells. Aphrona must have realized it, too, because she stopped trying to attack me and took a breath.

“You win,” she said. “It’s obvious we can’t beat you, so just kill us and get it over with.”

“Wow, the ego on you two,” I said. “The idea that there might be a mage who isn’t associated with your city in some way or another that’s strong enough to overpower you is just so unbelievable that neither of you even spared a moment to consider it as an option.”

Ivetra started to speak, but I held a hand up to silence her. “No, I’m done playing. This is no longer a debate. One way or another, I’m going to get some answers. How difficult you want to make that on yourselves is up to you. Now, let’s get this over with so I can be on my way. First question: where is the Sanctum of Light?”

“It’s a great tower, miles and miles wide that stretches up past the sky. You can see it from a hundred miles away, but you can’t actually approach it,” Aphrona said.

“Let’s get a bit more specific. If I want to go there, which direction do I start walking?”

“You can’t walk there. It’s on another island all to itself.”

“Pretend I can walk on water then,” I said dryly.

I wasn’t all that interested in their answers. Like most interrogations I did these days, I was pulling the information out of their heads. Having to keep my touches gentle enough that they wouldn’t notice did limit how much I could get, but the two still told me far more than they meant to. In short order, I’d gotten a verbal description of my route and a much more accurate mental map of the geography.

I’d also gotten an image of a truly immense tower, one that could house entire cities and stretched up miles and miles into the sky, though not one that looked anything like what Jules had pictured. Neither Aphrona or Ivetra had ever seen the higher floors from the inside, and they had the idea that the mana cascading down from the tower’s spire was so potent that it was fatal to get near the tower itself. All transport in and out had to be done via magical teleportation.

They both had memories of seeing the tower from miles away, a thick pillar of stone, metal, and magic that seemed to hold up the sky as it loomed over the nearby mountains. Neither had been able to get close enough to see the outer wall in detail, nor did they know what the land looked like around it. As far as they knew, it might very well rise out of the ocean itself, with its roots stretching down to the center of the world.

“Moving on, why were you so certain I would try to kill you?” I asked.

“We thought you were a child of darkness,” Aphrona admitted.

Perfect. I’d been hoping they’d bring that up with a bit of light prodding. So far, it looked like neither realized I was skimming information from their minds.

“And what is a child of darkness?”

“They’re renegade mages who oppose the Sanctum,” Ivetra said. “They’re like a cancer in the tower itself. They hide away and scheme of ways to disrupt society. They attack hospitals and churches and schools, break teleporters and light rails, burn down warehouses and farms. They’re the only ones who’d want to disrupt the pilgrimages.”

So all was not well in paradise. That was interesting to learn, and I mentally marked these children of darkness as potential allies. It sounded like they had some definite goals opposing those in power, which meant they’d almost certainly be more receptive to outside aid. My very presence in the Sanctum could draw hostility from its government if I wasn’t careful.

“I assume that there are children of light as well, then?”

“That’s everyone else, really. That’s who we are: the children of the Sanctum of Light.”

“How poetic,” I remarked. “Tell me more about what the inside of the Sanctum looks like and where the teleportation platforms you enter are located at.”

“I only know the one we came through,” Aphrona said.

“You’re sure about that?” I asked.

“Yes, this is our first time running a pilgrimage.”

I got the location from her, and scanned both their minds to confirm they agreed and neither were lying. “Now, the layout of the interior.”

“There are hundreds of floors,” Ivetra objected. “We’ve never even been to most of them. Our whole civilization lives inside this tower!”

I had the two women describe everything they could, from their schooling to their neighborhoods to their infrastructure. Consistently, what I saw in their memories was a place full of ambient mana. It could have been a city from the old world, so completely and utterly dependent on magic just to function. It seemed impossible for something like that to exist now.

Was there still a place rich in mana? If so, how could it exist when the rest of the world was a dead wasteland? It couldn’t be a coincidence that the Sanctum of Light was built inside the borders of the kingdom that had broken the world. They must have scavenged something from somewhere to have that much mana, maybe even the core of the broken moon itself.

I would definitely be investigating that once we got there. This was exactly the kind of stuff I’d been hoping to find out here. It wasn’t a certainty that the Sanctum of Light and the destruction of Manoch’s world core were directly connected, but even if they weren’t, I was certain I it would make a good starting point into my research.

“I think that’ll be everything I need from you two,” I said after their answers started getting repetitive. I wasn’t asking the right questions to get new information, and they weren’t volunteering anything. Even with my light mind probing, I was starting to hit dead ends. Maybe if I wanted to kidnap both of them and get into brutal interrogation sessions, I could pry out a few more interesting nuggets, but it hardly seemed worth the effort. It would be far easier to see exactly for myself what the Sanctum of Light was all about, and I had no doubt that I’d understand the magic underpinning the tower better than Aphrona or Ivetra.

“Good luck with your pilgrimage,” I told them before breaking the light spells illuminating the cabin. As soon as the darkness fell across us, I used shadow step to make my dramatic exit. This was more to keep my position secret from the pilgrims and townsfolk around the wagon than anything else. I doubted it would slow them down for long if they decided to come after us, but I did need a few minutes to get Senica moving.

A few more shadow steps got me to the edge of town, then a simple speed invocation saw me sprinting around the fields to the woods, where I one again shadow stepped from tree to tree when I could. Within a minute, I’d crossed the distance from caravan to home, where I found Senica sitting outside on the grass, a book on her lap and a concentrated sphere of dense mana floating above her hand.

“Why does spinning it make it want to flatten out?” she asked when she saw me. “The faster it goes, the flatter it gets. Also you said you’d only be gone for a bit. It’s been hours.”

“Complicated,” I said. “We can talk about it later. The Lightbearers finally made it to town. I got what we needed to know out of them, so there’s no point in hanging around. If we do, I wouldn’t be surprised if a mob tries to kill us.”

“Kill us? What did you say to get them that angry?”

“Well, you know how it goes. They were thinking about killing me since my presence was inconvenient, so I slapped them down in a spell duel. They were actually pretty weak for so-called divine messengers. I’m pretty sure you could have taken either of them in a straight fight.”

Senica preened at that for a moment before absorbing the mana she’d been playing with back into her core and closing the book. “How long do we have?” she asked.

“Oh, we can take a few minutes to pack things up. I doubt they’ll get organized that fast, or maybe even at all. I just don’t want to have to kill a bunch of townsfolk who were duped into fighting for a false cause, so it’s easier to just avoid them altogether.”

“I’ll go get ready,” she said. “I don’t suppose you brought lunch back with you?”

“No, sorry.”

Senica sighed and walked into the house while I considered the logistics of getting a hot meal for the dinner. I wasn’t going back into town for it, but maybe we could find a place somewhere down the road.