Book 2, Chapter 77

“I’ll give you a minute to try to process this on your own before I snap you out of it,” I said.

Neither of us knew exactly how many lifetimes’ worth of memories were stored in Keeper’s eye, but she’d had the memory sphere for over a decade now. Just having all of her own memories come back to her at once was likely to overwhelm her mind. She would need to adapt to that and learn how to sort through it before she delved deeper.

There was only so much I could do to prepare her, and in the interest of expediency, the fastest way to learn was to be subjected to the sensation. We’d agreed to do her trial run, which I’d act as a lifeline for. After that, she’d give us Echo’s location, simultaneously fulfilling one part of my deal with the Hierophant and getting his lackies off my back. Then it was more lessons on memory sphere management for the next half an hour.

As soon as Keeper activated the eye in the way I’d shown her, her whole body went slack. I’d warned her that she’d be unaware to the outside world while she was working with the memory sphere, a seemingly senseless risk to me. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen to leave myself that vulnerable, but apparently, she believed I’d guarantee her safety.

It was almost galling that she was right. I wanted Monarch’s location, and Keeper could give it to me. I’d keep her from coming to harm until that point. Still, that level of recklessness was not something I could condone. Assuming she survived all of this, I mentally marked her down as an unreliable business partner, one with poor risk management skills who couldn’t be depended on.

After a minute, I extended tendrils of my own mana to interfere with the circuit between Keeper’s brain and the memory sphere. She came out of her fugue with a startled gasp that turned into a cough. “That was… more than I thought it would be,” she said.

“Did you get an idea for how many years of information are stored in there?” I asked.

She shook her head with a frown. “It’s hard to parse everything. There was at least one other owner of the memory sphere before me, maybe two. The places and people they saw were not familiar to me, so it’s hard to say which memories belonged to who.”

“No indexing, huh? That’s going to take years to sort out,” I said. “Before you get started on that, however…”

The Hierophant’s goons leaned in closer. They’d been lurking around the table we were at—her sitting on a chair and me on the table itself so we’d be eye-level—waiting to get Echo’s location. Some of them had been patient and still, but one of the mages had gotten so twitchy that I’d ordered him to stay away from me until we were done.

He came rushing up to the table so fast that I almost blasted him with a conjuration by reflex. “It’s time,” he said, more of a demand of me than a general statement.

I rolled my eyes and gestured to Keeper, who was already starting the spell. With no reflective surface, she was forced to find a work around with her scrying. It wouldn’t do us much good if the information went straight into her head and stayed there, and I was rather curious what she’d choose. A simple illusion would probably be best, but I’d seen diviners draw out their visions or write out instructions, too.

Hopefully, it wasn’t going to be one of those. I wanted clear, unambiguous directions for the boys to follow. To my surprise, Keeper reached into a pocket in her robe and placed a marble on the table. An enchantment worked into it caused it to blow up to the size of her head, and an image appeared in its depths.

“How quaint,” I said. “An actual crystal ball.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Swarm had used a scryer’s orb to keep track of his constructs from a distance, too. There were a number of drawbacks to a tool like this, things like image distortion and inefficiencies in the projection, but it did have the advantage of allowing a large group of people to crowd around it and see the same thing from any angle.

“That’s the palace,” the twitchy mage said.

“Of course it is,” I said. “Isn’t this where you expected her to be?”

“No, I mean, that’s the palace up there, not down here in the Old Grounds.”

“She’s moving,” one of the elites said. “That’s going to make it hard to track her down.”

“What are you using to get a lock on her?” the calmer of the two mages asked.

“I’m afraid that wasn’t part of the deal,” Keeper said.

The Hierophant’s goon squad bristled at that. Elites unslung their shields, and the picture in the crystal ball started to waiver in the presence of so much draw stone presented directly to it. “Easy there,” I said. “Let’s not do something stupid when we’re this close to the goal.”

“This isn’t helpful,” Twitchy said. “By the time we get there, Lady Zara will be long gone.”

I gave him a hard look and said, “You’re not much of a problem solver, are you?”

There was plenty of loose stone in the Old Grounds, and Keeper’s Grand Archive was no exception. I grabbed a stray pebble with telekinesis and floated it over. A single spell later, and it was a scry beacon. “You can feel the mana in this?” I asked. “The signal it’s letting off?”

“I can. What is it?” the mage asked.

“It’s a beacon for scrying spells. You need to remember how this energy feels and seek that out again with a scrying spell later. That will let you contact me. I’ll be here for another thirty minutes. I trust that if you hurry, that will be enough time to catch up. You can reach me through the beacon and see the crystal ball.”

“A roundabout way of doing things,” the other mage said. “But it will work. We should hurry. The longer we delay, the harder it will be to catch up to Lady Zara.”

The group quickly organized itself and departed, leaving me alone with Keeper. She watched the whole thing with mild interest, then turned to me and said, “Ready to try again?”

“Can you keep that scrying spell going while you’re viewing the memory sphere?”

“I cannot, not yet.”

“I guess I can pull you out if I need you to,” I said. “I’ll try to give you the full half an hour uninterrupted to practice.”

Keeper nodded and relaxed into the chair. The crystal ball went blank and her eyes drifted up, unseeing. I shook my head and sighed. For my sake, I hoped she figured things out soon. I didn’t want to deal with her trying to renegotiate after her time was up.

Idly, I reached out and picked up the crystal ball. I’d taken a good look at the scrying spell and thought I knew what the link to Echo was. I cast the spell myself, and an image of the blonde woman still walking down the halls flickered to life in the depths of the ball.

  *

The good news was that the Hierophant’s men caught up to Echo twenty-three minutes later. They must have run the whole way, and I had to admit, they moved faster without me in the group. The bad news was that Echo had known she was being pursued, and led them into a trap. Twitchy was dead, as were two of the elites. The rest of the group was huddled behind draw stone shields, unable to effectively capture her without leaving their cover.

For all that, there was only one of her, and the draw stone shields were hindering her as much as they were the remaining mage. Eventually, they figured that out and rushed her. She was probably skilled enough to avoid letting the stone steal mana from her core, but that didn’t make it easy to work a spell with the shields pressed up against her.

I was honestly surprised they managed to capture her, but once they pinned her down, one of the elites produced a pair of draw stone restraints connected by chains. It included a neck collar and manacles for both her hands and her feet. It wouldn’t have stopped me, but I supposed I could see where it would be adequate to hinder Echo enough that they could control her movements as long as they kept an eye on her.

I let the image go. That part of the job was done, and I had no more interest in her fate. Instead, I studied Keeper. She’d shown no signs of moving other than the shallow rise and fall of her chest with each breath. That wasn’t a great sign, honestly. It probably meant that she was still struggling with getting control over the overwhelming number of memories inside the sphere.

At the appointed time, I pulled her back out. She came to and blinked her eyes several times, then surreptitiously wiped a bit of drool from the corner of her mouth while I pretended not to notice. “How long has it been?”

“The whole half an hour,” I said. “How’d you do?”

“I am no closer now than I was the first attempt. It’s… too much.”

I could have told her that. Even if the memory sphere had nothing but her own memories, this wasn’t the kind of magic a mage just jumped into and mastered instantly. It would probably take her weeks or even months to really gain some level of control over it.

“Unfortunate. Perhaps I could teach someone you trust how to pull you back to the waking world later, after my business with Monarch is concluded. Speaking of, I believe it’s time we move into the final stage of our agreement.”

“Yes,” she said, clearly unhappy.

Keeper claimed her crystal ball again and gave me a quizzical look. “Those people did not need further instruction?”

They had, but admitting that would also be admitting I’d figured out what link she’d used to find Echo. The truth was that Twitchy had harassed me for updates every few minutes while they traveled. They could have at least made it back up to the surface before he started in on me, but I’d humored him and given him the images Keeper’s crystal ball showed me.

“They never contacted me,” I lied. “I don’t know if that means they completed their mission or if the mage failed to find the scry beacon I made for him. Either way, it’s not my problem. If they come back down here looking for more help after I leave, you can do whatever you want with them.”

Keeper regarded me silently for a second before starting the spell. Whether she believed me or not, there was nothing to be gained from arguing about it. She worked her magic, and the silver-haired, golden-eyed leader of the Wolf Pack appeared. Monarch looked up, directly at the scrying spell and through the ball to make eye contact with me.

She smirked and crooked a finger.

“Perfect,” I said dryly.

Recognizing the feel of a scrying spell was an essential talent for any mage of importance, but it wasn’t one I’d seen in today’s crop. Despite my hesitation to divine more information about them, the only issues I’d run into were the rare ward dedicated to detecting such attempts and Monarch herself, right now.

“Did you think she wasn’t aware of your presence?” Keeper asked.

“No, that would be foolish. This outcome is fine,” I said. “I suppose you’d best hope for my victory. I imagine she’ll be quite upset with you otherwise.”

Keeper laughed, a dry, coughing rattle. “I think you may not know Ferris as well as you believe,” she told me.

“Not well at all,” I murmured. “Very well, tell me where to find this room she’s sitting in.”