Book 2, Chapter 70

The information Haze had given me in exchange for her life was in line with my own observations about Monarch’s base of operations. She was in the very center of the inner city, in the Palace of the Hierophant. More specifically, she was underneath it.

Digging my way in was not feasible. It would take weeks and weeks to do, maybe months depending on what kind of defenses I found. Infiltration was more likely to succeed, but still had its own issues. Palace guards made enforcers, even the inner-city version, look like kittens. The way Haze told it, they were well-equipped, numerous, organized, and better trained than the average enforcer by a wide margin.

The palace also had not one, but three wards stones, again, according to Haze. I’d gotten a brief look at Monarch herself, but I’d learned very little about the fortifications she was surrounded by. That was unfortunate, because Haze wasn’t a trustworthy source. Everything she’d told me so far had been accurate, but it only took one well-placed lie to trip me up, one single instance of failing to understand what I was walking into, and it was over.

The final option was to just walk away. There was nothing any of them could do to stop me. There probably wasn’t even anything they could do to find me after I left. But I’d already reviewed that option and discarded it when Monarch had tried to stab me in the back at our meeting. I wasn’t going to leave an enemy alive behind me to plot and scheme.

Just approaching the palace was an endeavor. The inner city wasn’t packed by any means, but its streets weren’t empty, either. After what I’d done to Velvet’s castle, the other nobles had heightened their own security. It wasn’t just enforcers patrolling the streets now. I wasn’t sure if the other people were mercenaries or personal retainers, but the number of armed men with hawkish stares watching the streets for suspicious movements was significantly higher than it had been a month ago.

That didn’t make it impossible, just tricky. For one thing, the sewer system might have been severed directly beneath the inner wall, but it was still intact under the city itself. The rich and influential who lived here were very aware of the tangled network of tunnels beneath their feet, however, and many of them had taken steps to block them off.

Luckily for me, I’d already done an enormous amount of scrying, and I had a good map of the inner city in my head. Spending the extra mana to use ward-sensing divinations had been completely worth it for the functioning model of the unprotected passages through the inner city. It was ironic, in a way: a normal city would never have had so many obvious gaps in their defenses, but in Derro, everyone fortified their own residences and in no way contributed to the governing of the city.

The enforcers were the first, last, and only line of defense in keeping Derro from falling into lawlessness, and they were more like the biggest bullies among the gangs than an actual police force that promoted law and order. Here in the inner city, it was even more obvious who’d paid to keep an enforcer presence near their home and who’d chosen to rely on other forces.

It took hours to make it to the Palace of the Hierophant undetected. I crawled through partially collapsed tunnels, used magic to drift through iron grates installed to block passages, snuck down shadowy alleyways or across the roofs of huge mansions, and threaded my way through various wards designed to do everything from stopping me from moving forward to blowing up everything in a hundred-foot radius when they were triggered.

And at the end of that journey, one that only took me a bare mile or two, was a palace with its own wall. I’d done some scrying of the place, but its wards were much more sophisticated than even the ones separating the inner city from the outer. The detection wards were the most sophisticated I’d seen since my reincarnation, rigorously maintained and fully capable of detecting any sort of crossing. The only weakness was that, unlike the inner-city wall, whoever had warded the palace had made no effort to conceal the defenses.

Even scrying them risked warning someone of my tampering, and the only way I’d successfully penetrated them earlier was that Monarch had left an open window for me by scrying out from the palace. I wasn’t getting in there undetected, not unless I took the wards down beforehand. That wasn’t even possible. At best, I could set off a chain reaction through the wards that caused a mana surge and blew out a single ward stone, which would put an additional burden on the other two, but it wouldn’t actually bring the wards down.

That being the case, I needed to accept that I wasn’t going to pass through the wards without anyone knowing. Powerful as their divinations were, that did not mean the palace guards would be able to find me once I was inside. As long as I could unravel any tracer enchantments the wards placed on me when I passed through them, I should be able to disappear into the palace fast enough to avoid capture.

That was what I was doing now. The wall was ten feet away from me, and I was relying on shadow cloak to keep me hidden as I approached it. Then I started casting divinations rapidly, looking for the trace component of the ward. I could have done it manually, but there were a lot of wards to go over, and my time was limited.

Lurking across the street also gave me the benefit of not standing out in the open to analyze the wards, which circled back to not getting caught. It was bad enough that the mages inside the palace would know where I breached the wards without the added complication of the guards physically seeing me do it. Once I was through, I’d need to move fast to find a new hiding spot.

In the course of examining the wards, I found unwelcome, but not unexpected, news. Unlike Velvet’s castle, the wards here didn’t have a key. Every single person who was allowed to pass through them freely had been individually attuned. If I wanted to get through without setting them off, I needed to trick the wards into thinking I was someone who belonged here. Given enough time to observe the comings and goings of the palace staff, I might have been able to manage it.

I didn’t have a place to observe that, nor did I have that many hours left before the sun rose. It didn’t seem likely that many people would be exiting or entering the palace in the dark hours anyway. While infiltrating the palace undetected would definitely make my job easier, it wasn’t something I could pull off tonight.

Once again, part of my mind urged me to back off and think more carefully about what I was doing. Monarch wasn’t a real threat, that part argued. Mages in this city barely qualified as apprentices. I was taking unnecessary risks to kill someone I could just as easily ignore.

All those thoughts were true, after a fashion, but they didn’t take into account the treasure chest of antiques from a bygone age. Unlike the mages wielding those weapons, the artifacts were real threats. So far, the ones I’d seen hadn’t been wielded to their full potential, and it was certainly possible that they never would be.

It was equally possible that Monarch knew exactly how to draw every ounce of power out of those weapons and simply hadn’t felt a need to share with her cabal until now. The Wolf Pack commanded an enormous amount of resources, so much so that cutting them off from Alkerist hadn’t made a noticeable dent in their bottom line. There were dozens upon dozens of villages just like mine, most probably equally isolated, that were tithing their mana to the city.

That didn’t even account for Derro itself, with its population a hundred times bigger than Alkerist’s. I had never quite figured out what the locals got out of their leech stone economy, but I had my suspicions that the wealth ultimately ended up in the hands of the nobles and merchants living in the inner city, where it was traded to the mages in exchange for various services or enchantments. Someone was keeping all those wards active, and I had my doubts that a cabal of mages was doing it out of the goodness of their collective hearts.

All of that meant that I either addressed the problem immediately, or hoped that I could grow faster individually than they could with thousands upon thousands of people tithing. Or I ran and prayed that they didn’t ever find me.

My divinations found the part of the ward I was looking for. It was a simple tagging enchantment that would cause me to glow and attract the attention of anyone who’d been attuned to the ward. It was perfect for catching whole bands of thieves who tried to sneak in, unaware that the invisible ward they’d crossed was lighting them up while simultaneously reaching out to the brains of every guard nearby to make sure they saw.

It was also buried so deep that if I hadn’t been explicitly looking for something like that, I might never have noticed it. Now that I had found it, though, I knew exactly what the enchantment was and how to unravel it. I’d even get a small bump of return mana for breaking it down after the ward tagged me with it.

I estimated it would take me three seconds to rid myself of the enchantment, which was plenty of time to be spotted by a nearby guard. I mentally rehearsed the sequence of magic I’d be casting a few times, then darted forward, pierced the wards, and used phantasmal step to ghost through the walls.

Though I couldn’t see any difference when I looked down at myself, I knew the illuminating enchantment was playing across my body. I broke it down, looked up, and spotted two of the palace guards running at me. One of them hesitated, obviously confused that the tracer spell had broken, but his companion didn’t so much as slow down.

I cast shadow leap to disappear and reappear a few hundred feet away where no one had seen my entrance. The wards tried to crush that spell, too, but I’d gotten a good enough read on them to anticipate their interference. The best they could do was hobble my range, not stop me completely.

That did nothing to stop those two guards that had seen me from raising the alarm. If they hadn’t been so well protected from my own enchantments, I’d have done something to prevent that, but my best options were offensive conjurations, which were flashy enough in their own rights. More guards came running to the scene of my entrance, but I didn’t stick around to watch them get organized.

I chose a window on the second floor and shadow leaped again to get up there. Windows were a luxury comfort here, and not one used very often. The palace was an exception, probably for security, and I could tell at a glance that the glass had been enchanted for extra toughness. The palace walls themselves had additional wards on them, but nothing as intimidating as the outer walls. I was through in moments, stopping once again to break another tracer spell, and ready to ghost down the halls while the guards scoured the outer perimeter for me.

That was when I felt the wave of another temporal scry pass through me. Unbelievable. At the rate the Wolf Pack was burning through mana, I was going to win this confrontation just by bleeding them dry. I’d seen their books. I knew how much mana they brought in every month. They’d drained over a year of their reserves just scrying on me through the future at this point.

It hadn’t stopped me, but it made things damned inconvenient. This was evidenced by the eight guards spilling out of various rooms into the hallway I was standing in, catching me between them as they formed ranks and leveled spears in my direction.