Book 3, Chapter 8

I used the teleportation platform to send us to Ghalin, but only because it saved me some effort having to draw my own circle to spread the effect to everyone instead of just myself. All of the Ghalin group came with us, even the wounded ones. Our own healers had done a credible job patching them up over the last few hours, good enough that the injured could use their own mana to recover from there. Even without any sort of real training, self-healing invocations were practically instinctive. It was trying to heal other people that was complicated.

Whatever Talivir might have thought about two teenaged mages coming along, he kept his opinion to himself. I saw him eye both of us up, but he was smart enough not to do anything that might jeopardize the rescue party coming to their aid.

Once everyone was ready and on the platform, I activated the circle and used my own magic to search out a teleportation beacon. As I’d suspected, by brute-forcing their departure platform instead of using it properly, the Ghalin party had broken something in it and drained the inscriptions of their mana. At this point, it would be just as expensive to use the platform, so I selected the village I’d scried instead.

“What?” one of the Ghalin people asked in surprise when they arrived. “We’re… but I thought we’d have to…”

“The platform you left from is broken now. It wouldn’t make any difference where we went, so I decided to save everyone the walk,” I said. I didn’t mention how it also saved me at least eight hours of travel—or maybe more, considering how slow the wounded in the group would move—and however much mana would be wasted fending off monsters.

“Convenient,” Ryla said, giving me the look she always did when we argued about platform placement. She’d wanted one in every village she traded with. I’d wanted to maintain some semblance of security. There wasn’t much point in a sanctuary if everyone could get there, especially if they could do it from anywhere.

It didn’t much matter anymore. There were too many people and it was too well-known. The teleportation platforms had been a compromise to allow the people living there to have access to friends and family, but it was obvious the traders weren’t doing a good enough job keeping the locations secret. I would have to modify them with some wards if I wanted to keep unwanted travelers away. That would cause a massive spike in mana usage, though.

“It looks a lot like our old village,” Senica said. I followed her gaze to see mud-brick huts just like the ones Alkerist had, each with its own tiny garden attached to it. The whole village was surrounded by fields growing the same crops I remembered. Other than the fact that the streets were laid out differently and the trees just kind of grew randomly in little copses instead of being focused into the arbor, it really did look just like home.

“This is the closest village to Alkerist,” I said. “I guess it’s not too surprising that there’s a lot of overlap in how things are done.”

We started spreading out, with most of our group following the Ghalin natives to the east to see about hunting some monsters down. Senica went with them, but Ryla and I stayed behind with Talivir. “I suppose I should get started on teaching the mages here how to shroud their cores,” I said. I could feel about twenty people with full mana cores, which didn’t necessarily mean they were mages, but it was usually a good bet.

“You’re going to be the one who does that?” Talivir asked.

“Is that a problem?”

He considered me for a moment, then said, “I can’t feel any mana coming from you at all, but you were the teleportation mage… I guess that means you know what you’re doing.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said dryly. “Yes, I’m qualified to teach your local mages the technique of mana shrouding. If any of them are any good at it, I might even show them how to completely shield a mana core instead of just dampening it.”

“It’s not that hard to do,” Senica added. “See?”

She shielded her own core, albeit imperfectly, causing Talivir to raise his eyebrows in surprise. “I had no idea…”

“Stop trying to show off,” I said. “It’s easy to do, but it’s hard to hold indefinitely. Shrouding doesn’t take nearly as much effort, and as long as everyone here learns how to do it, it should alleviate almost all of your monster problems. It’ll be like it was before you had mages.”

“That… could be a problem,” Talivir said. “We figured out an easier way to do that core ignition thing and pretty much everyone went for it. Technically, I guess we’re all mages now.”

It took a lot of willpower to keep my expression smooth. Either the mage from our sanctuary that had been working with this village had been an idiot, or someone in a highly influential position here was. I’d made sure to spell out the dangers of doing exactly this. I’d stressed them heavily. They should have known better.

“Instead of mastering mana control to use the spin method, you figured out that you can just shove in a bunch more mana and it’ll ignite the core that way,” I said.

“You already knew about that?” Talivir asked, surprised.

“Yes. It’s a common way to spontaneously ignite a core without even trying in an area rich with ambient mana. It essentially cripples you long-term since your mana generation rate is usually only about a quarter to a third what it should be, but if every single person in the village is ignited that way around the same time, the sudden increase in mana would attract all sorts of monsters while leaving you no good way to defend yourselves.”

“Not sure about all of that, but it doesn’t matter now,” Talivir said. “What’s done is done.”

“Of course it matters,” I said. “Instead of training two dozen people, I’ve got to get over a hundred to wrap their heads around this skill well enough that they can maintain it in their sleep. I’m not even sure it’s worth it at this point.”

“Not worth it?” Talivir repeated. “We’ll die if we don’t get some help.”

“On that, we agree. But at this point you’ve got enough mana generation that I’m considering a ward stone to put a barrier around the village instead. Alkerist has something just like it to keep monsters out.”

Even that wasn’t an ideal situation. Monsters couldn’t get in, but they could and did form lairs near the village that threatened to cut it off completely from the world. I hadn’t done a lot of work with the villagers of my home on how to shroud a core, but the knowledge existed there and they’d spread it as needed. For the most part, the nightly tithe had conditioned them to donate mana anyway, and with the majority of that going into the ward stone, which was properly shielded, it was a significantly smaller issue there.

Here, they’d gone wild with their newfound power. My idea of teaching a small handful of people to shroud their cores wasn’t going to work. Even worse, the attacks were almost certainly worse at night. During the day, people would be spending their mana as they always did. Then it built back up while they slept, attracting the mana-sensitive monsters to the village.

“Okay, who’s in charge?” I asked. “Let’s start with talking to them and see where we go from there.”

“That’d be Zalick,” Ryla said.

That name sounded familiar to me, but I couldn’t place where I’d heard it before. I’d met a lot of people over the past few years, too many to keep track of. I’d probably just heard this one in passing when Ryla had started putting together a trading one with Ghalin.

“Great. Let’s go find him then,” I said, gesturing to Talivir to lead the way.

He frowned down at me, then cast a glance over at Ryla. She nodded back, which was apparently the permission Talivir thought he needed. It looked like no one had told him who I was, and all he saw was a bossy teenager who happened to know a bit more than average about magic. I wondered what assumptions he was making about who I was, but not enough to spend mana reading his mind. It sounded like Zalick was the guy I needed to convince to listen to me anyway.

“How many people are living here?” I asked. “And did you ignite all of them, even the children?”

“Two-hundred seventy, and everyone over the age of ten.”

A ward stone as a temporary measure might just be the best idea, after all. I could spend a day or two teaching a few people the mana control needed to shroud their core, and the whole village could keep the barrier going until they figured things out enough to stop attracting monsters. Then they could take their time cleaning up their own mess instead of relying on us.

I couldn’t think of any other way that wouldn’t result in me spending weeks here, but I didn’t want to do a ward stone if I could help it. That would cost the most mana, and while I had plenty to spare these days, that didn’t mean I wanted to waste it. Even if I made it in my crucible, it’d still be expensive to create an entire ward stone from nothing.

We walked toward the center of Ghalin, where we found a hut that was bigger than average. It had two doors, one on the front where they were normally placed, and one off to the side on an addition that had been added on. Much like in Alkerist, the doorways had blankets or curtains hung up to give the residents a bit of privacy. The extra door on this house had an actual wooden doorway, something of a rarity here in the wastelands.

Talivir walked up and knocked on the door. “Zalick, sir. I’ve got Trade Captain Ryla here as part of the group from Sanctuary.”

“Wait, ‘Sanctuary?’ Is that our official name now?” I asked Ryla.

“I had to tell people we came from somewhere,” she said. “That’s what you kept calling the place.”

“I guess so,” I said. “Seems like something I would have known.”

“Maybe if you’d ever left before today…”

The door opened to reveal an older man with black hair starting to go gray and the thin, almost wasted appearance that was so common in villages like this one. There was never quite enough food to go around, and if even the guy in charge of the place was in this shape, things were probably worse off here than they’d been in my home village. No wonder they’d decided to ignite as many mana cores as possible. It was probably that or starve.

“You made it there?” Zalick asked. “That’s fantastic. Was anyone injured out in the wilds?”

“There… there were a few injuries, yes. No deaths though. Everyone should make full recoveries.”

“That’s the best news I’ve heard in a month,” Zalick said. He looked over Talivir’s shoulder and smiled. “Hello, Ryla. Come on in. And who’s this with you?”

“Gravin,” she said. “Our best mage.”

That was an understatement, but I let it slide. Zalick welcomed us into what looked like some sort of mixed accountant’s office and library study room. It was stuffed with books, but everything was covered under the paper-equivalent of some sort of creeping mold. Piles of paperwork filled the chairs and spilled out of boxes piled up in the corners. The shelves themselves had more stacks of paperwork stuffed in wherever a book wasn’t, usually on top of them. There was a desk, or at least some sort of desk-sized box. For all I could see it, it could be anything.

“Forgive the mess,” Zalick said. “Things have been hectic for… uh… well, I’m not very organized and things have been growing worse in here for the last few decades.”

If he’d been working here for decades, he’d been around back when the Wolf Pack still had control of the entire island. That thought was the tip off I needed, and now that I knew where to look, I immediately spotted the signet ring of the cabal on his finger.