Book 2, Chapter 65

If not for the modifications I’d made to her vanishing knife, Haze probably could have snuck up on me.  I was tired from the back-to-back fights with Velvet and his vengeful phantasm, not to mention the infiltration and escape from his castle. It was the perfect time to ambush me, and if they’d sent anyone besides Haze to do it, I would have launched an attack already.

But the truth was that I didn’t want to fight right now if I didn’t have to. This night had taken more mana out of me than I’d wanted, enough that, absent a source to steal from, it would take me over a week to regenerate it. Haze was the one person in the cabal I had a chance of ending an encounter with talk instead of more violence.

She appeared, a hundred feet away and exactly where I’d expected her to be. There had been some risk that someone cleverer than her, Weaver perhaps, had spotted the modifications I’d made to the vanishing knife and decided to use it as a decoy. If that had been the case, there was every possibility I’d be staring at the knife while Haze came at me from the other direction.

Of course, in that scenario she would have to contend with my shield ward, so it would actually have been better in a way if she’d abandoned her weapon. It was a moot point though. She either hadn’t detected the enchantment or didn’t care enough to relinquish the vanishing knife. When she appeared, she just shook her head and walked toward me until twenty feet of distance separated us.

“I know there’s no way you picked this place out ahead of time,” she said. “There are definitely no traps or wards like the last time we met. And yet, somehow, you still knew I was coming. Very suspicious.”

“Did you need something?” I asked. “I can’t imagine you followed me all the way out here for a social call.”

“More of a work matter,” she said. “I passed your message on to the boss. She decided that since you had your heart set on exterminating Velvet’s line for some reason, that could be the test. Velvet was given advantages far in excess of his normal allotment of mana, and if he couldn’t manage to kill you, and if you survived his final act of revenge, you were good enough to deal with directly.”

“Lucky me,” I said dryly. “So what does your boss want?”

“Ideally, I think she hoped you and Velvet would kill each other, but that didn’t happen.” Haze hesitated a moment. “You know… I don’t actually make a lot of big-picture decisions in my work. I get a target and some criteria, and I’m generally left to kill them however I deem best. This is kind of a weird job for me. Right now is the point where my orders are to kill you if I think I can or offer you a meeting to discuss a cease fire if not.”

“Don’t leave me in suspense. Will it be the knife or the oshinka branch?”

“The branch,” Haze said without hesitation. “Even now, I’m afraid I can’t take you. Your mana shroud is so thick that as far as I can tell, you don’t have any mana.”

I certainly wasn’t about to tell her how little of my total reserves I had left. That might make her change her mind, and I’d hate to have to walk back to Derro after I killed her. I didn’t think Haze would even try, though. A wide-open patch of barren rock wasn’t exactly the best battlefield for her style of combat, either, especially not against an opponent she knew could keep track of her movements.

“So what does Monarch want?” I asked.

“For starters, she wants to know what you want. You’re the one who came here and started killing us.”

“Call it preemptive self-defense,” I said. “If your cabal hadn’t sent mages to my village, I might have left you alone.”

Well, I would have at least tried diplomacy to get access to their archives. If that had failed, things probably would have played out much the same way, though likely with a bit less collateral damage.

“I don’t know anything about that,” Haze said. She raised a hand to cut me off when I started to reply. “I also don’t care. The mana farms were something Velvet handled. If you’re trying to get your village exempted or whatever, you should talk to Monarch about that. I’m only here to invite you to meet her.”

Did I want to meet Monarch? At this very second, the answer was a definitive no. I needed time to recover. In a week or two, I might change my mind. “What would be the purpose of this meeting?” I asked.

“Whatever you two decide, I guess. That’s not my business. I’m just supposed to get a yes or a no and give you this if the answer is yes.” Haze held up a small hand mirror, practically a twin to the one already in my phantom space. She was crazy if she thought I was going to carry about a scrying beacon to announce my location to a mage whose organization I’d been dismantling for the last few months.

Something must have shown on my face, because Haze said, “Obviously you don’t want to carry it around on you, but you could store it somewhere and fetch it once it’s time for the meeting.”

“Why not just have the meeting right now and be done with it?” I asked.

“No idea. I am just the messenger. I’ll tell you what. You say yes to the meeting, and I’ll set this on the ground. Then I’ll give you a time and leave. You can do whatever you want with it after that. My understanding is that the range on these things is thousands of miles, so I don’t see it making a difference if you decide to keep on heading into the desert.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll agree to the meeting.”

Haze placed the mirror on the ground and said, “Four days, at sundown.”

Then she turned and walked away. Mana flickered around her, then she vanished into the darkness, only to reappear at the edge of my perception for a moment before fading away altogether. Shadow leaping long distances wasn’t an efficient way to travel, but it wasn’t my mana being wasted. I was just glad she was gone.

I walked over to the mirror and examined it. Even if it was exactly what Haze said it was, by its very nature, it was designed to focus scrying on it. Carrying it around would be announcing my location to the Wolf Pack. Even taking it back to the city with me and hiding it there would give them an idea of how fast I could move or, more accurately, how much mana I was willing to spend on it. The smart move here was to leave the mirror exactly where Haze had set it, even if it proved to be nothing more than it seemed.

On the other hand, if I was going to go through with the meeting, leaving it where it fell meant coming back out to get it later. The best solution would be to somehow mask the scry beacon tied to it, but that ran the very real risk of breaking its connection to whatever mirror Monarch had on her end. Doing that would be pointless. I might as well just leave the mirror behind.

Before I made any decisions, I decided it was best to examine it and see exactly what it did. Though the mirror didn’t look like another one of those items that completely outclassed anything modern-day mages were making, it was best to be sure.

I picked the mirror up and turned it over in my hands.

*

“Huh,” I said. “That’s really sloppy. Or it was on purpose.”

In the last twenty minutes, I’d scoured the mirror’s inscriptions and its enchantments. Surprisingly, it was a standard design, and by that I meant standard to what I’d consider normal. That almost never happened when I encountered local spells. With very few exceptions, they were usually inefficient, made using lesser runes and needing extra runes to compensate for the poor design.

This mirror, by contrast, could have been any old apprentice’s personal communication device back in my day. I’d seen a thousand just like it over the years, and probably made a few hundred of them myself. That was why I knew about a common flaw in a basic scrying mirror that generally got overlooked as it took a bit of extra effort to fix and only came into play if the mirror had a scrying beacon attached to it.

With a standard inscription like the one used on the mirror, if it also happened to be enchanted with a scry beacon, the mirror could be used to scry back on whoever had enchanted it, even if they weren’t actively scrying themselves. It barely took any work to confirm the location of the enchanter, presumably either Weaver or Monarch herself.

The vague sense of location I got from my initial brush with the mirror pointed back towards Derro, but I couldn’t tell where exactly in the city it was linked to without actively putting mana into the mirror. That ran the possibility of alerting whoever was on the other side. It would be far better to just take the mirror back into the city where I could narrow it down, but to do that, I needed to mask the beacon itself.

I thought I had a way to do that, one that wouldn’t even require that much mana. It involved altering the enchantment on the scry beacon to loop it back to its target, so that if Monarch or whoever tried to scry through it, they’d see themselves. There was a slight risk that they’d trace that loop and stop it at the exact right point to find the mirror, but even for me, that was a tall order.

I finished altering the enchantment, gave it one more check to confirm everything was alright, and stuffed the mirror in my phantom space. Then I looked at the city and let out a heavy sigh. It was going to take hours to walk back, but my mana reserves were so low that I couldn’t risk flying. Teleporting wasn’t even possible with how much I had left, not even to a beacon.

I almost hoped I did run into a monster on the way back. Those were generally good for harvesting more mana than they took to kill, as long as I was smart about it. I had four days until this supposed meeting with Monarch. Maybe I’d spend my time wandering around looking for things stuffed full of mana to kill.

Or maybe I’d go straight back to Derro and finally take a pass at the Repositories. Those held plenty of mana. I shook my head. No, that was a bad idea at this point. If I was going to enter into a ceasefire with the Wolf Pack, raiding their supply of fully-charged leech stones was off the table. It would be much better to get the mana as some sort of concession in the negotiations.

And if those negotiations fell through, I’d loot the Repositories after I finished exterminating the entire Wolf Pack. By then, maybe I’d finally have the time and mana to build myself a bigger, better mana crystal. My first one was still serving me well, but I was getting to the point now where if I was going to keep raiding other mages’ lairs, I needed something that could hold more mana.

Lost in my plans for the future, I began the slow, dreary trudge back to Derro. I was slightly disappointed to arrive at the outer wall a few hours later without having encountered a single monster.