Book 2, Chapter 56

As soon as I felt my wards split to let something through, I cast a force wave to throw everything around me back. The assassin mage was hurled into the wall, losing whatever tool she was using to bypass my wards. That tool struck me on the shoulder, splitting open my shirt and drawing a hot, painful line of blood across my skin.

“A vanishing knife?” I asked, glancing at the weapon as it became visible. Without the assassin holding it, the enchantment stopped concealing it. Vanishing knives were expensive to produce and to operate. They’d been relatively rare even back in my day, if only because people like me made a point of hunting down and destroying them and the people willing to create them. No mage wanted to see a weapon that could cut through magic in the hands of their enemies.

The assassin lunged for the weapon, literally bouncing off the ceiling to go over top of me, but I punted it with telekinesis and sent it flying through a hole in the wall. That was not a weapon I wanted floating in my phantom space, not with such a high risk of it damaging things.

Before the assassin could escape, I grabbed her with greater telekinesis and threw her into the ceiling. The spell only worked for a second before she slipped out of it and rode the momentum to phantasmal step through the ceiling and land on the roof. It wasn’t exactly an unexpected outcome, especially given her kit seemed to be focused so heavily on movement, but it did make it hard to pin her down without killing her.

“What is it with you people and your high-quality toys?” I asked, knowing she could still hear me. “Every time I run into one of you, I’m surprised by the sophistication of your equipment. You guys always have two or three pieces that are exactly in line with my expectations, and then occasionally you pull out something that I doubt your master enchanter could make if his life depended on it.”

The assassin didn’t answer me, unsurprisingly. She was a professional, probably taught things like not to make idle chatter that would give away her position. Or maybe she just had that dour personality that meant she never got invited to any parties growing up. Either way, it didn’t look like I was going to get anything out of her as long as she was on the loose.

From what I could tell, she didn’t have any sort of shield ward for herself. Considering her weapon of choice, that wasn’t particularly surprising. There wasn’t much point in spending money on something she’d dispel every time she attacked. That did leave her vulnerable, though. That wouldn’t be a problem when she killed her victim without them ever realizing she was there, but it was a major liability against me.

The way I saw it, she had three choices. The first and probably smartest choice was to cut her losses and run. I did not suspect she’d go that route. The second choice was to go after the vanishing knife, but that came with the complication of leaving cover to grab it from where it had landed out on the street. If she went after it, she’d need powerful magic to protect her from attacks. The third choice was the one I considered most likely: she’d come after me directly.

My shield ward would rebuild itself automatically over the next twenty or so seconds, which left her with a very brief window to take a shot at me before she had no choice but to recover her weapon. Given what she’d displayed so far and how quickly her core was diminishing, the attack would be sudden, come from an unexpected angle, and be as brutal as possible.

I felt the mana appear behind me, just to my left where the shadows were thickest. Life sense immediately picked the assassin out for me, far more reliably than my eyes and ears. She came out of her shadow leap mid-kick, one leg already in the air and lined up to strike the back of my head. This was exactly the kind of attack my shield ward had been designed to protect me from, except it was still rebuilding itself around me.

I could have killed her in that instant. All I had to do was be willing to take the blow in order to deliver one of my own. She’d already told me her mission was to capture me for questioning, ironically enough, so I had good odds that the attack wouldn’t kill me.

But it still would have meant getting kicked in the head, which I was not alright with. A mana shield flashed into existence around me at the same time I reached up a hand charged with paralyzing grasp. The spell needed almost direct contact to function, which meant some tricky timing to hold mana shield stable just long enough to absorb the force, then immediately dropping it to touch the assassin’s leg.

She was quick, her movements empowered with some sort of speed-boosting invocation. I knew because I was doing the exact same thing, and I still missed her by a hair’s breadth. Her leg bounced off the mana shield and, rather than be confused or surprised, she simply continued her attack, jumping straight up and letting the momentum spin her to kick out at me from the other direction.

At that point, I did get clipped, though I’d ducked low enough that the kick tore across my scalp rather than broke my nose. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but it worked for me. Paralyzing grasp was a bit of a misnomer. It required contact with the target, which was generally achieved most easily through the hands. But that wasn’t a requirement.

I released the spell up through my head into her leg and tumbled backwards from the force of the kick. Even though it barely grazed me, there was enough strength behind it that I was glad I hadn’t tried my luck at her striking to injure, not kill. Maybe she didn’t care if she killed me, or maybe she couldn’t properly calibrate her strength for use against a child. Either way, pain blossomed in my head, more than I’d felt since the day of my rebirth.

But while my body was young, my mind wasn’t. I’d been hurt many times. For the last hundred years or so of my previous life, my world had been pain, so much so that not even the magic keeping my body from rotting away could block it out. I could handle being barely touched by a kick moving fast enough to crack my skull.

It still knocked me on my ass and left me vulnerable, but by that point, the assassin’s muscles were contracting painfully from the lightning surging through her body. She wouldn’t be getting up in the next few minutes, though I’d be willing to bet she’d shake the spell off quicker than anyone else I’d used it on. I needed to work fast if I wanted to keep her contained.

The first thing to do was drain her mana. I cast the spell and slapped a hand on her arm. “Well, that’s done,” I told her. “Now let’s see about getting rid of your toys and binding you so you can’t escape.”

The assassin tried to jerk away from me, but it was more of a slight twitch, not quite enough movement to count as a flop. The fact that she was already twitching was a bad sign, though. Working quickly, I jerked the shawl wrapped around her head away and undid the straps holding the mask in place.

I honestly wasn’t sure if I could pull off a stone shape spell again, not at the rate the assassin was pulling out of my paralyzing grasp spell. Perhaps her equipment had helped her partially resist the spell. More likely, she’d used part of mana reserves to block the flow of lightning inside her body and I just hadn’t noticed in the moment.

If I didn’t have the long minutes needed to bind her to the floor with ropes of stone, I’d just need to buy myself more time. Whatever she’d done before, I’d taken her equipment and her mana. It only took a few seconds to cast strangling hand, and she was in no condition to resist the spell. She went unconscious quickly enough.

Now I needed to restrain her before the loss of air caused brain damage. I didn’t dare release her until I knew for sure that she couldn’t attack me, and I’d rather kill her than risk letting her get away. I worked as quickly as I could, and under the effects of my spell, I got her into a sitting position against the wall, then formed bands of stone across her wrists, forearms, crossing her chest and coming down from her shoulders, as well as across her neck, waist, legs above and below the knees, and ankles.

Only then did I let the strangling hand spell fade, but even as the assassin’s eyes started flickering, I thickened the loops of stone holding her in place. It grew over her hands completely, sealing them, motionless, to the wall. I couldn’t imagine what she might do with her feet free to move, but more stone grew up around those as well. Last, a cap of stone grew over the top her skull, holding it tightly in place.

By the time her eyes focused and she saw me, I had her restrained with something like two hundred pounds of stone I’d pulled from the building and wound around her. If it had just been the weight, I suspected she might still have made a run for it, though it would slow her down significantly. But no, the stone was growing out of the building, chaining her to it in a similar pattern to the one I’d used on Yano.

“I thought I’d see if you were in the mood to talk now,” I said. “Spent an awful lot of mana on this whole setup, so I hope it’s comfortable for you.”

“Pinching my arm a bit,” she told me.

“That’s unfortunate to hear. I’ll keep it in mind for next time.”

She rolled her eyes and said, “So you got me. Congratulations. First time for everything. What do you want?”

“Let’s start with that knife of yours. Where’d you get that?”

“The master gave it to me.”

“And who is this master?” I asked.

“Master of the cabal.”

“What’s their name?”

The assassin hesitated for a second, then shrugged as much as her bindings would allow and said, “Monarch.”

That wasn’t anything I couldn’t have guessed for myself, but I liked that so far, she was willing to cooperate. Now I just needed to make sure she wasn’t feeding me bad info. “You know, you’re the fourth cabal mage I’ve gone up against. How many more of you am I going to have to take care of?”

“Velvet, from the sounds of it. After that, who knows. Up to you and the master to figure that out.”

I let out a soft laugh. “Well, there’s some truth to that. Let me rephrase the question. How many mages are part of the Wolf Pack? Just the core members. I don’t care about those trash mages kept around to pad the numbers.”

She frowned and said, “Nine?”

“You’re asking me? How would I know?”

“Well, you killed three of them. Wait, so… seven?”

“Are you sure of that?” I asked while casting a quick mind read. “That doesn’t even add up.”

Ash and Echo, Weaver, Velvet. Freak’s dead. So that’s four. Keeper and Monarch is six. Hangman doesn’t really count, and nobody’s supposed to know about Sibilant. Oh, there’s me, I guess. So seven.

“Seven,” she said confidently.

Ah, a new name. And finally, I’d found someone who knew about Sibilant. I’d been curious about that one for a while. I held up a hand and started ticking off names. “Monolith, Swarm, and Freak are dead, so we won’t count those. Ash, Echo, Velvet, and Weaver. That’s four. You and Monarch make six. Who’s number seven?”

“Keeper. She doesn’t get out much. Doubt you’ll ever see her.”

Keeper,” I repeated. “That’s seven, but what about Sibilant?”

For the first time, I saw a bit of emotion on her face. And it was fear. “How do you know that name?” she whispered.