Book 3, Chapter 34

Despite my sister’s frequent complaints, I did not enchant our temporary house with all the luxuries she’d grown accustomed too. If we’d been planning to stay for more than a few days, I might have considered it, but as it was, it was easier and more cost-effective to just create the water needed for a bath and heat it up manually than it was to build an enchantment to do it on command.

At least, it was easier for me. Senica wasn’t quite as practiced and didn’t have the mana generation to spare for generating gallons and gallons of water. We compromised there; I filled the tub for her and she heated it herself. Anywhere else, she was on her own. If she wanted light to read by, it was her responsibility to create it. If she wanted a heated room to sleep in, she could lay those wards herself.

Unhappy as she was about it, it did provide her with ample motivation to keep progressing her skills. When we’d started this journey, she couldn’t make any kind of ward at all, but the necessity of mastering those spells had driven her to work hard. Now her heat wards were functional, if a bit shoddy and extremely inefficient. She’d soon learned to keep a blanket handy when the enchantment ran out of mana and broke.

 During the week, I’d done quite a bit of spying and snooping, both in-person and through scrying spells. Not everyone was quite as zealous as Jules, but it seemed like the whole town viewed the Lightbearers and their miracles as irrefutable proof of their religious beliefs. Unfortunately, the townsfolk knew very little of the information I actually wanted, so I was stuck waiting for the angels to show up while the town slowly geared up for its festival.

The first pilgrims arrived four days after we did, and they brought word that the Lightbearers were only a day or two out. This sent the townsfolk into a frenzy to finalize their preparations, mostly stocking their tribute of food and drink, hanging decorations, cleaning, and preparing an outdoor banquet.

I sent my scrying spells out to sweep the roads, dumping more mana than was wise into increasing my range. My work yielded results quickly enough, and I found a procession of more pilgrims about fifty miles northwest of the town. Most of them were traveling in small groups, no more than five or six people, but this one had closer to a hundred and, more importantly, it had a caravan train of wagons with it. Inside one was a pair of women dressed in clothes unlike anything I’d seen from the inhabitants of this new world.

They wore fine silks, richly dyed in yellows and soft reds with white trim. Their feet were slippered, completely inappropriate for anything more rigorous than a walk round the garden. They had their hair combed out fine, then piled up on their head and held in place with innumerous pins and combs.

In short, they looked like the daughters of a powerful and rich aristocrats. Only the fact that their mana cores were full to the brim and I noticed their earrings contained mana crystals betrayed that they were more than their appearance. It was hard to judge how potent those crystals were just through my scrying spells, but the fact that they each had two made me suspect they were limited.

A single, bigger crystal was always the better choice if it was an option. More crystals meant greater transference loss and more complications in drawing from them while casting. That was why I was working so hard on converting my giant boulder so that I could cut the connections to my old bank of crystals now that my mana core was big enough to make a crystal this size. It would serve me for at least another three stages, but unfortunately, it wasn’t finished yet.

I’d left a lot of mana in my old crystals just in case I needed to toss a few master-tier spells when I finally met the Lightbearers, but otherwise a full core and lossless casting meant I could use magic all day without ever running out of mana.

I hadn’t been idle while we waited for them to arrive. There were no less than fourteen ward stones buried around the town, each tuned to provide different kinds of barriers. I’d had to use both enchanting and inscription combined to create mana batteries that were shielded from detection and would flood the ward stones with power the instant I willed it. I was as ready as I could possibly be to face them if they turned out to be hostile.

I might have been content to sit and wait, but I spotted Jules hustling down the road the day after the first pilgrims arrived. I had no doubt whatsoever that she was rushing out to meet the Lightbearers and tell them that I was here. Her version of our meeting would certainly paint me in an unfavorable light and poison any first impression I might make.

I was tempted to fly out and meet the so-called angels on the road, but that would render all my preparations moot. It was extremely unlikely that I’d need them, regardless, but I hadn’t gotten to my age by taking needless risks. The solution then was not to blindly rush into a confrontation, but to stop Jules from accomplishing her goals.

“I’ll be back in an hour or so,” I told Senica as I stirred from my chair.

She glanced up from her own project of scribing runes on a piece of parchment using a quill and ink. “Why? What’s going on?”

“Just an errand to take care of,” I explained as I cast a critical eye over her work. “That ular rune is wrong.”

“What?” Senica reached over to the book and flipped back a few pages to compare the diagram to her own work. “Damn it!”

I left her to her corrections and stepped outside. A few moments later, I was in the air and skimming across the tops of trees as I flew out to intercept my detractor before she could reach the pilgrim caravan.

  *

I had to give it to Jules. She was fast and relentless. For a society that completely shunned the idea of doing magic, her instinctive invocations were surprisingly refined. If I hadn’t literally read her mind to confirm her own beliefs, I would have thought she was lying about her capabilities.

I caught up to her ten or twelve miles out of town. Jules was jogging along at a steady pace, her boots clomping against the ground tirelessly and her breathing coming hard. She’d been running for the better part of an hour and showed no signs of slowing down.

I dropped out of the sky right next to her, startling a shriek out of her and causing her to jump away from me. “Hi, Jules,” I said. “Let’s talk, shall we?”

“God save me!” she cried out. I could see the terror in her eyes, a sincere belief that she was about to die. For whatever reason, she’d gotten it into her head that I was a demon who’d come into her life for the sole purpose of ruining it.

“Oh, relax,” I said. “I’m not here to hurt you. Despite what you keep telling everyone about me, I have no interest in doing anything to your town.”

I left unsaid that while I could easily silence Jules, I’d have to resort to mass memory manipulation to make the whole town forget about the woman. Otherwise I’d just be making things worse for myself. And while I would never call myself a good person, mind magic and necromancy were lines I had no interest in crossing ever again. Nothing good lay at the end of that road.

“Blasphemer,” she hissed. “Heretic. Apostate.”

I rolled my eyes. Every conversation I’d tried to have with the woman went the same way. Something about me knowing how to cast magic made Jules completely unreasonable, and after the first few days, I’d given up and resigned myself to ignoring her. My scrying spells had caught her working to turn the whole town against me, proselytizing to them that I was a harbinger of darkness and evil, that if I was allowed to do my work, they’d all be cast from the light and left to the predations of the monsters that lurked in the shadows.

“I won’t let you turn my home away from the light,” she declared. “I’ll fight you to my last breath.”

“I hate zealots,” I muttered. “So unreasonable.”

Jules was torn between fleeing and attacking, but I wasn’t interested in either option. Before she could muster up the nerve to make a decision, I cast a simple paralyzing grasp spell on her. She stiffened with a gasp and slumped over. A greater telekinesis spell caught her and laid her gently on her side.

“Look, I’ve tried to be reasonable about this. And when that didn’t work, I left you alone and gave you your space. Even though you’ve spent the week campaigning against me, I never stopped you. So here’s my offer. We’re going to go back to Halgir together, you and I. We’ll wait for the Lightbearers to reach the town, and we’ll talk to them. If they really are divine beings like you believe, then surely nothing I could say would deceive them.”

Jules didn’t—couldn’t—reply, but she heard me. Part of me was tempted to leave her in a hole out in the wilderness, but until I got a chance to actually talk to the Lightbearers, I wanted to avoid doing anything to upset them. I assumed their local priestess going missing hours before they arrived for their yearly tribute qualified as something like that.

Fortunately, Jules wasn’t a massive woman. Greater telekinesis had no trouble lifting her, and I towed her behind me at the sedate pace the spell demanded. We made it two miles or so before paralyzing grasp wore off and she started struggling. I stopped and turned to face her while she spat curses at me and thrashed against the magic.

“Look, we can do this two ways,” I said, my patience finally exhausted. “We can go wait in your parlor for the Lightbearers to arrive and meet them together. Or I can meet them by myself, and you will be nowhere to be found. At this point, I’m prepared to deal with the fallout of that decision rather than have to spend another minute fighting you.”

“Showing your true colors, at last,” she sneered. “I refuse to serve you. Slay me that my spirit might ascend to the Heaven and join the ranks of the divine.”

“I’m not asking you to ‘serve me’ or anything like that. I just want you to shut the hell up and sit down until your angels get here. I’m tired of you trying to screw with my business and I’m annoyed with the way you speak to me. So choose: we walk back to town in silence and sit in a room together while we wait, or I walk back myself. Either way, I’m done dealing with you.”

If looks could kill, the one Jules gave me would have struck me dead on the spot. Some brief moment of sanity must have finally penetrated the fog of zealotry her brain was constantly shrouded in, and rather than fight me further, she turned smartly on her heel and started marching back down the road.

I doubted Jules would cooperate now, but at least this way, I could babysit her for a few hours and keep her out of trouble. Once I made initial contact with the incoming Lightbearers, I’d decide my next move. I just needed to make sure I intercepted them before they actually heard all the rumors Jules had spread about me.

Sometimes, the urge to just blow up inconvenient things could be downright overpowering. Lucky for the town of Halgir, I was capable of exercising restraint, but at this point, it really did seem like going out to meet the angels would have been the easier option.

Too late now, I supposed. We walked back down the road, Jules ahead of me and stiff-backed while I monitored the area with my divinations. One way or another, this whole thing would be over in the next few hours.