Book 3, Chapter 11

Without resorting to stronger scrying spells, I couldn’t do much besides look around at the moment. The building was three stories tall, sort of a squat tower, and though it had a roof, it wasn’t the sort that kept out the weather. It was more like a canopy that was mounted at the top, one that left plenty of space for a mage with a flight spell to get inside.

In my previous life, I would have assumed there were plenty of invisible magical defenses crossing over those gaps, but these days, the cost to maintain barrier spells on what appeared to be an abandoned tower on the top of a mountain were too high. Something like that would require a constant influx of mana to keep active, and considered how much accumulated dust and dirt was inside the interior of the tower, I doubted anyone was hanging around keeping any wards powered.

Weirdly, the building itself was hollow. Whatever its purpose was, it seemed obvious to me that human habitation wasn’t the goal. It was more like a silo than a tower, once I got a look on the inside, with alternating balconies wide enough for two or three people to stand on and windows to let sunlight in.

“What are we looking at?” Talivir asked, though it wasn’t clear who exactly he was talking to. It felt like I occupied two distinct roles in his mind. In one, I was a mage and clearly knew more about magic than he did, so he didn’t question my decisions. Outside of that, I was just some kid, too young and stupid to know anything about how the world worked.

“Some sort of home for a flock of flying monsters, maybe,” I said. “Is there anything like that around here?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Talivir told me. “Nothing I’ve ever seen anyway, except for the bats, and those are new.”

“Used to be,” someone else said. “Decades ago. The birds.”

The speaker was an old man, his hair faded and wispy and his face lined with deep wrinkles and a few scars across one side. “Big, giant things,” he said. “Used to come through every few years. They’d pick monsters up right off the ground, carry them off, and drop them on the rocks. Made a hell of a mess for us to clean up after they’d eaten their fill.”

“Those have been gone longer than most of us have been alive,” Talivir said.

“Doesn’t mean that building hasn’t been there even longer,” I argued. “How big are these birds? Would this fit them?”

“Might,” the old man said. “Might not. Depend how big they were. The biggest ones were the size of a four houses combined, no way one of those would fit, but for most of them, yeah, about right.”

“So that’s what it is then, some kind of eyrie for huge birds that’s been abandoned for half a century?” I asked.

“I mean… Probably,” the old man said. “Can’t think of what else it could be.”

“That’s interesting enough to investigate, I suppose. It’s in the right direction and it’s near where your first hunter died. Maybe something else is living there now.”

I slipped my big scrying mirror back into my phantom space and turned back to my half-finished meal. Before I could take a bite, Talivir said, “Handy trick. Think you could teach me how to do that?”

“No,” I said. “My best students haven’t managed it yet, and I’ve been working with them for years.”

I’d only ever seen one other person with a phantom space since my reincarnation, and he’d been a mind-controlled assassin acting as a bodyguard for the head of the Wolf Pack cabal. His space had barely been big enough to hold his weapon, let alone to do anything useful. I suspected one of my early apprentices, Ayaka, would be the first one to create her own space, probably in conjunction with Tetrin. She’d need his crucible, or rather, the upgraded version he’d eventually make.

Talivir settled back into his seat with a, “Hrmph” noise. Let him be pissy about it if he wanted; no one in this village was even close to the point where they were ready for basic spells. Creating a phantom space was practically a masterpiece in spell work, not something any random apprentice did for fun and convenience.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this came up again from Zalick once he heard about it. Phantom spaces were incredibly useful, after all, but my answer would remain the same. Despite his status as a former cabal mage, Zalick hadn’t impressed me with his magical expertise. I suspected there was a reason he’d been sent out here to Ghalin instead of remaining in Derro with the majority of his cabal.

I ate the rest of my meal in silence and excused myself when I was done. It was a bit early to be going to bed, but I wanted some time to myself to prepare for tomorrow’s activities. Senica would probably jump at the chance to come with me, and this kind of experience was good for her, so I’d take her along.

That meant getting more information and making sure I had the tools and mana needed to take care of any potential problems that might crop up when we visited the eyrie, which meant getting away from pesky interruptions.

Usually, I did this kind of prep work in the sanctum I’d hidden inside our valley home, a place no one but me knew about or could access. Tonight, I’d settle for a hut near the edge of town and just hope everyone left me alone.

I could feel a number of eyes watching me walk away from the village square, and I was afraid my hopes were soon to be dashed.

  *

“It’s too far away,” Senica whined. “We should just fly.”

“We?” I echoed. “I wasn’t aware that you had mastered flight.”

“I’m getting better at it.”

“And your mana reserves?” I asked.

Senica cleared her throat and looked away while she mumbled something.

“What was that? I couldn’t quite hear you.”

“I said, ‘I would need to use your storage crystal.’”

“Which is only for emergencies, so it looks like we’ll be walking.”

It was just the two of us right now. I already knew the route thanks to my divinations, and taking anyone else would only raise the cost of mana to reach the eyrie. At some point, we were going to need magic to scale the cliff the tower was perched on, though I suspected that mana would go to a spider climb spell rather than flight magic.

“How was your monster hunt?” I asked a minute later.

“Good. I’m in the lead right now, but I guess maybe I won’t be soon since I’m not going to kill anything today.”

“Don’t be so sure about that. There’s nothing to say there won’t be monsters up in the mountains. I’ve seen plenty of them when I was investigating the area.”

Senica perked up, but then she frowned. “Do those count, though? They’re not threatening the village.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know the rules to your game.”

“Every monster killed is worth a point,” she said. “Not much else to it. The thing is, I can’t prove how many I incinerate today, since there’s no witness. Maybe if you vouched for me?”

“Do you think they’d believe me? I’m obviously biased as your brother.”

“Yeah, true,” Senica said. “Hmm… I don’t know. I guess I’m just not playing today.”

“Take trophies,” I suggested.

“What?”

“Ears or paws or something. Easy enough to count your kills then, unless someone wants to argue that you cut a piece off a living monster and then let it go.”

“Then I’d have to carry that gross stuff.” Senica paused and gave me a shrewd look that I did not like one bit. “You could carry it for me.”

“Nope,” was my immediate reply.

“Aw, come on. Help me out here.”

“Not a chance.”

“Gravin!”

“Senica.”

“I don’t want to lose my spot. I’m in first place, please—”

I held up a hand to stop her and frowned up the trail. “Quiet,” I said softly. “There’s… something…”

I had a basic sensory enhancement invocation running, not that it was doing much good with all the noise we’d been making, but that wasn’t what had tipped me off. I could feel a whisper of mana nearby, but whatever the source was, it was crafty enough to hide itself. Keeping a scrying spell running at all time wasn’t really feasible, not if I wanted mana left to do anything else, but I could afford to poke around for a minute here.

I swept the trail up and down over the next thirty seconds while Senica and I watched for movement, but nothing jumped out to me. I was starting to think whatever I’d sensed had just been passing by and was already out of range, but then Senica raised her wand and cast a flame lance spell at the cliff face above us and to the left.

Something peeled away from the stone, though I couldn’t figure out quite what it was other than that it was transparent and flat. As it died, a cloud of mana burst out of it, but the monster was too far away to collect any before it dissipated into the air.

“Those things are the worst,” Senica said.

“Killed them before?”

“Yeah. One of the hunters showed me how to spot them. They like to cling to rocks above trails and fall on people walking underneath. Any time the slope is sheer or hangs over the trail like it does here, you have to watch out for them.”

“Well done,” I said. It wouldn’t have been any danger to us if it had dropped on our heads, not with our shield wards full of mana, but I was suitably impressed that Senica had spotted it and killed it with a single spell. “I’m not sure you can harvest a piece of that, though.”

“I don’t want to anyway, not if you’re not going to carry it for me.”

“I’m not.”

Whatever it was my sister muttered under her breath, it was probably better if I didn’t overhear it.

  *

We stood at the base of the cliff where Ghalin’s first death had occurred. In person, it seemed even taller, easily a few hundred feet high. I didn’t think anyone could climb it without magic, and it was so intimidating that I was starting to reconsider my decision not to just fly to the top.

“Are you sure we need to climb this? Couldn’t we just… you know…” Senica waved her hand up into the air, unknowingly echoing my thoughts.

With a sigh, I shook my head. “No, we should do it the smart way. I used a lot of mana making the ward stone and I haven’t recovered from that yet. Now’s not the time to be lazy.”

“I’m just saying, I’ve killed twenty-two monsters already. Have we really saved any mana by walking?”

“You are grossly underestimating how expensive flight magic is, and besides, we’re already here now. Come on, show me your spider climb spell.”

Grumbling, Senica reluctantly cast the spell, then moved to start climbing the wall. I followed up behind her, ready to catch her if her focus should fail and the spell collapsed. It wasn’t that I doubted her ability, but if she did fall, I wasn’t sure that she’d be able to cast a feather weight spell to save herself. It would depend on how panicked she became.

My sister performed to expectations, however, and ten minutes later, we both crawled over the lip of the cliff to stand before the eyrie. It looked much the same as it had when I’d scried it, but now that I was there in person, I could feel a big difference.

“Ah,” I said to myself. “That’s what it is.”

“What?” Senica asked.

“A beacon of sorts,” I said. “You might consider it a guidepost or a lighthouse. It tells travelers where to go.”