Book 2, Chapter 76

Other lights flashed red as we walked. The two mages with me muttered back and forth to each other and cast glances in my direction, which I ignored until one of them tried to stop me.

“Those lights are letting someone know we’re here. Are you sure you—” he started to say.

“I’m following the signal back to one of the Wolf Pack mages,” I told him. “It was easier than trying to find her myself.”

That seemed to mollify them, at least for now. I didn’t figure any betrayal would come from their direction at this point, so I wasn’t terribly worried about keeping a close eye on them. That wasn’t to say I didn’t have one of my scry spells, one known as invisible eye, pointed directly at me so that I could see what was going on behind me. At this point, it wasn’t worth saving a bit of mana at the cost of such an enormous blind spot, not with potential enemies at my back.

The click of a door opening cut through the silence ahead of us, followed by the soft sweep of a robe trailing across stone. I didn’t even need to turn to follow the noise; the tattling mage lights were all pointing me directly towards it. We’d have contact with the enemy in the next thirty seconds.

“Keeper’s coming,” I said. “Don’t panic. Don’t take any shots at her. Don’t touch anything. In fact, don’t do anything at all unless I tell you to.”

Both mages and three of the elites all bristled at those instructions. “We’re not children to be lectured,” a mage snapped.

“If you don’t like it, you can leave,” I told him bluntly. “I do not have time to babysit you. Either follow my orders or go back up to the palace.”

They wouldn’t leave, I knew. But this was a good chance to push some buttons and do a bit of quick mind reading. I cast the spell while I was talking and snooped on the mage who was arguing with me.

This little shit. Who does he think he is? Just because he’s got some freakish raw power, he thinks he’s smarter than every adult around him. I should blow his head off right now, while he’s off his guard. We’ll go find Lady Zara ourselves and tell the Hierophant he died fighting the Wolf Pack.

The thoughts sounded bad, but there was a lot of bluster to them. He was a man trying to work his nerve up to do something he wanted to do, but was too afraid of the repercussions. Beneath the thoughts, I could see his concerns. What if he took a shot at me and missed? What if he killed me, but the rest of the group didn’t back him up? What if he got away with it, but he ruined the Hierophant’s chance at finally ousting the Wolf Pack? What if they found Zara, but failed to bring her back to the surface without my help?

All those fears jumbled around in his head, and that was why I knew he’d never have the courage to actually attack me. He wasn’t stupid. He was just angry. I was being deliberately abrasive—not that I had to try too hard at that. Just being ordered around by a child usually resulted in the adult either humoring me or getting upset. When I was trying to set him off, it was even easier.

A quick scan of the other mage showed similar, if more tempered, thoughts. His fantasies ran more along the lines of putting me in my place after the mission was over. There was no chance of him doing anything to jeopardize the odds of success in the middle. Unfortunately for me, I did get the definite sense that his priorities were to find and capture Echo first, help me second, and that once Echo was in custody and Monarch was dead, he could consider the mission completed.

I’d been right. This group would happily swoop in to crush me if they thought they had an opening once I’d dealt with their problem for them. I might have to kill them myself if we didn’t find Echo and send them all back up to the surface prior to meeting Monarch face to face. That was a problem for the near future, though. Right now, I had Keeper to deal with.

I left the Hierophant’s goon squad behind and strode forward to meet a wizened old woman. Despite her age and the slight hunch to her posture, she was still quite tall, about the same height as Tetrin, though her frail frame couldn’t weigh even half of his. Surprisingly, her hair was still full and dark, a glossy black: an odd vanity, all things considered.

Most arresting about her appearance was her eyes. One was blue, the other green. It took me all of two seconds to determine the coloring wasn’t natural. The blue eye was fake, but I had no doubt it saw far more than her real eye did.

“The mighty Keiran,” she said with a shallow bow. “I wondered if I’d have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. You’ve caused quite the stir this season. Not bad for your first appearance in over two thousand years.”

“You’ve heard of me,” I said. “I wondered if it was you or Monarch who put together who I am.”

“You may rest assured that most knowledge comes from me, from this archive which flows through my mind.”

“Don’t you mean ‘through your eye?’” I corrected.

Keeper let out a small, coughing laugh, almost a wheeze. “Still sharp, even in that new body. I told Ferris she’d be a fool to challenge you if you really were who you said you were. Too proud to back down, that one. Too many centuries of ruling uncontested.”

“Ferris being Monarch’s real name?” I asked.

“Don’t ask questions you don’t need the answers to,” Keeper scolded.

“Fair enough. I forgot who I was dealing with. My apologies.”

“You’re polite enough, I’ll give you that,” Keeper said. “What about your friends over there? The Hierophant’s lackies, it seems.”

“Here looking for his daughter,” I explained. “Perhaps I’m not the only one asking questions that don’t need to be answered.”

“Perhaps,” Keeper said. “Let’s move on from circling around the point and talk about what you really want. You’d like me to step aside from your dispute with our esteemed leader.”

“It would be in both our best interests,” I told her.

“To be blunt, what’s in it for me?”

“If we’re going to be that straightforward about it: I’d hate to have to kill you.”

“I’m sure you can do better than that,” Keeper said. “You’ve been gone for a long time. I’d bet you have many questions. Did you discover the origin of the curse of the lost language yet? You must have run across some signs, by now.”

“It hasn’t made its way to the top of my priorities to investigate yet,” I told her. “But I’m sure you know.”

“I do,” she agreed. “Though it’s not some great mystery. You just have to know which old books talk about it to find out. I could be persuaded to point you in the right direction if you’d like to read them yourself.”

“I think that’s a good start,” I said. “What about—”

“Hey, we’re here for Lady Zara,” one of the Hierophant’s mages said. “What about her?”

A pained expression flitted across my face. “I suppose we ought to consider that as well. Do you happen to know where Echo might be lurking, and could you be persuaded to share that information with us if you do?”

“I don’t know where she’s at, precisely, but I could find out,” Keeper said. “Would you like to add that to our negotiations?”

“We probably should, if only to keep these guys happy.”

I’d give Keeper this much—if nothing else, she wasn’t lacking for courage. Some of the cronies lurking behind me could take lessons from her. Knowing what she did about me, and it appeared the Wolf Pack really had figured out who I really was, she’d stood her ground better than some kings I’d dealt with in my glory days.

“While we’re talking about locations, you could save me some trouble and point me to Monarch, as well,” I added.

“That wouldn’t be fair,” Keeper admonished me. “Stepping aside to let you two work things out is one thing, but actively working against her is quite another. She is my patron and, in some respects, my oldest friend.”

“You do know I’m planning on killing her, right?”

Keeper brushed that question aside and said, “Now, as I understand things, not only were you considered the best of the best in your time, but your era predates the Age of Wonders. Your performance against my cabal to date supports that you have a wide breadth of knowledge we lack in modern-day spell casting. Is that correct?”

“To put it mildly,” I said. “It’s appalling how much has been lost since my day.”

“You know, there is a large swath of history that considers all of this to ultimately be your fault,” Keeper said. “Your vaults, your secrets. You might not have broken the world yourself, but you provided the ones who did with all the tools they needed to get the job done.”

“Well that’s just ridiculous,” I said. “No one’s blaming the blacksmiths for all the swords they make. It’s not like I asked anyone to break into my vaults and steal my notes and equipment. I very specifically set up wards designed to last for centuries to prevent that from happening.”

And then I’d gone and taken a few thousand years to reincarnate, but that wasn’t my fault. These people were lucky I’d come back at all. It wasn’t like anyone else was going to fix the entire planet. I just needed another few years to finish growing into an adult body so I could advance my own mana core a few stages first.

“That’s neither here nor there,” Keeper said. “You know things we can only dream about. Ferris’s inheritance is full of tools from the Age of Wonders, tools we’ve never come close to utilizing to their true potential. You’ve killed a few of the weaker cabal members. I’m sure you’ve examined the artifacts they wielded. Could you unlock their secrets?”

“You don’t care about those toys,” I said. “You want me to help you with your eye.”

“That is what I was driving toward, yes.”

“Memory sphere,” I said. “Odd to have it constructed as an artificial eye, but I’ve seen weirder affectations in my time. I’m guessing it’s got enchantments to help you decipher foreign languages and point you back to passages it’s viewed when you think about finding them. A lot of the mana seems to be interfacing with your brain, probably a divination built in to allow you to control it by thought.”

“That is… essentially correct,” Keeper said. “But I know it can do more.”

“Have you figured out how to access the memories stored in it yet?”

Keeper frowned and touched her cheek just below the fake eye. “I didn’t know it could hold memories,” she said. “Whose memories are in it, though?”

“Yours, for starters, though it’d be a lot of work to sort and archive them now. Whoever had that eye in their skull before you got hold of it would have memories tucked away in there too. Hopefully they were more aware of the eye’s powers and spent some time organizing things. If there’s a long line of owners just recording every second of their lives with no thought to pruning away useless memories, you’re going to have a lifetime of work ahead of you trying to sort through it.”

“You can teach me how to access these memories?” Keeper asked, leaning forward to peer at me closely.

“I can.”

“And in return…”

“You step to one side in the coming battle. You give me the locations of Echo and Monarch. Nothing more.”

Keeper considered it for a moment, more for appearances than because she hadn’t already made up her mind. I knew because I was reading her thoughts to make sure she intended to keep her word.

“I believe we have reached an agreement,” she said.