Book 2, Chapter 47

I stepped into the room at the top of the castle. There had been two guards outside the door, both dead now. I dragged the bodies in with me using greater telekinesis and deposited them in the corner. Unlike the noble girl, these ones had been armed with simple weapons and no magic. If they hadn’t been directly in my way, I’d have gone around them and let them live.

As soon as I walked through the door, I understood the security. There was a writing desk off to one side with a small bookshelf next to it and a few barrels on the other side of the room, but the majority of the floor space was taken up by a basin large enough for me to lie down in set on a stand about two feet high, and a curious contraption just to the right of it.

At first glance, a scrying pool seemed like a strange choice for someone this rich. Mirrors were more expensive up front, but they were also more reliable. Only poor mages used water for scrying spells. It was convenient, sure, but it cost more mana, plus there was a whole process of pouring liquid mana in to mix with the water that made the whole setup a bit obnoxious to use.

But a scrying pool had one clear advantage over the typical mirror besides the almost nonexistent initial investment. The water could be drained away after the spell ended. With a mirror, nosy and smart mages such as myself could reconstruct the contents of the scry by using the right spells. Once that basin was drained and the water went down the pipe leading away, it was gone. There’d be no recovering it.

That was the setup here. A sluice was filled with water from the barrels, allowing the mage to empty it into the basin without any real effort whenever he was ready to cast a scrying spell. When he was done, the water would be drained out through the plug in the bottom.

It was all very tidy, and other than destroying the equipment, there wasn’t much I could accomplish here. I eyed up the bookshelf, which only had three thin volumes bound in black. I snagged the first one and flipped through it, a frown on my face. It was in some sort of cypher that I might be able to decode, given enough time. The other two were more of the same, but I took them anyway. If the information was important enough to be locked behind a guarded door in a warded room and written in code, it was important enough to deny the enemy.

If I felt like I wasn’t making any headway after an hour or two, I’d destroy the books just to make sure there was no way they could be traced back to me. Books weren’t great scrying mediums because there were generally dozens of copies of them, which diluted the spells trying to track them. The three journals were personal notes, almost certainly unique, and would be much easier to trace. I’d make sure I was behind my warding spells before removing them from my phantom space.

All of my precautions were probably overkill. The kind of divinations that could track these books were expensive and complicated, easily advanced tier magic. But then again, Echo had cast a time sight spell on Freak’s lair and spotted me. The cabal had spent an enormous chunk of mana on it even with her third eye, but I supposed it was worth it to them.

It simply proved to me that they had a lot of resources, and that their inner circle was strong enough to cast an occasional advanced tier spell. I would be foolish to underestimate them, so while my precautions were almost certainly wasted effort, I was going to go through with them anyway.

I wrecked the plumbing and cracked the basin in two, then staved in the barrels. It wouldn’t be much more than an inconvenience, but it was better than nothing. Before I left, I put up another surveillance spell, though I doubted I’d have the opportunity to come back for this one. Then I walked back out and snuck to my final destination.

* * *

The ward stone was on the ground floor. That made it harder to reach undetected simply because of the increased presence of servants and guards, but on the bright side, the door leading into the room itself wasn’t guarded. Even if it had been, I possessed the ward key and could have simply walked through the wall if needed.

Once inside, the first thing I did was use stone shape to create a false wall over the inside of the doors. Nobody would be getting in without breaking that down first, which I was sure they could do, but not fast enough to catch me. Soon enough, everyone would know what I was up to.

Ward stones, like any other inscription, weren’t designed to have mana pulled back out of them. They were filled with mana, and then they did their job. They did not like when the mana went the wrong direction. The simpler ones didn’t even like having more mana added until they were completely drained. What I was about to do was going to screw with the wards all over the castle. People were going to figure out where I was almost immediately.

But I’d been generous with mana usage throughout this infiltration specifically because I’d planned on doing this, and extracting myself was going to be expensive. There was no reason not to top off my reserves and break the ward stone on my way out. So I set up a delayed teleportation spell, one that would go off two minutes after I finished casting it. My destination was my old hideout in the outer city, far away from my soon-to-be pursuers.

As soon as the spell was finished, I started a mental countdown until it went off, then I attacked the ward stone. It was a struggle to pull the mana out, but I knew plenty of dirty tricks, and this particular set of inscriptions hadn’t been made to defend against any of them. The mana came to me reluctantly, but it did come.

The big outer wards surrounding the whole castle were the first to break, but the inner ones quickly went down, too. Within thirty seconds, I’d disrupted every single ward being powered by the stone, including the tattler around the archives. That was guaranteed to alert at least one person, which meant it was only a matter of time until someone tried to force their way in.

At the one-minute mark, I heard people outside the doors. They were trying to open them, but the stone wall prevented that. My own mana crystal was almost two-thirds full, but I wasn’t sure I was going to completely charge it up before the teleportation went off. I should have given myself another thirty seconds, just to be safe.

Twenty seconds later, the people on the other side of the doors decided to bust them down by force. Loud booms echoed through the room in rapid fire as they repeatedly slammed something heavy into the stone barrier. Other than glancing at the spiderweb of cracks rapidly forming across the wall, I ignored it.

I had ten seconds left when the cracks broke open, making a hole about a foot wide. My mana crystal was as full as I was going to get it, so I sent mana surging sideways through the runes and caused the ward stone to overload. I looked back just in time to make eye contact with a surprised looking woman wearing a guard’s uniform.

I lifted one hand to wave to her, then let the delayed teleport take me away. I wasn’t there to see it, but about four seconds later, the ward stone exploded, most likely killing everyone gathered in the hallway.

* * *

It had been a long day, but I had one last thing to do before I caught some much-needed sleep. I strode through the night—well, as much as someone with legs as short as mine could be said to stride anywhere—to one of the backup ruins I’d noted during my exploration that would keep me hidden, climbed up to the hole in the second floor with a spider climb spell, and created my standard set of non-detection wards to hide under.

While I wound down from my exertions, I pulled out one of the encoded journals and started working on a possible cypher. Since time immemorial, mages had been trying to protect their research from the prying eyes of their colleagues, rivals, and apprentices. There was no telling how much knowledge had been lost when they’d died, leaving behind nothing but spotty notes written in languages they’d invented themselves.

But that did mean that, by necessity, almost every mage had some knowledge of cyphers and how to break them. I’d lived long enough and raided enough troves claimed from fallen enemies that I was particularly well-practiced at it. Sometimes the key to decrypting a set of notes was simple, though I’d seen my fair share of doubly-encoded notes left as traps for the unwary who didn’t realize there was a second cypher to break, only to fall victim to malicious instructions when trying to cast spells gained from the decoded notes.

I spent an hour working my way through a few ideas I had, but I was tired, and the journals would keep until tomorrow. Today had been productive, but I hadn’t accomplished the big goal of finding Velvet when I’d raided that castle. Instead, I’d caused a lot of problems and killed people who were only indirectly associated with the cabal in the process of gaining information and resources.

There was plenty of time, and sooner or later I’d find someone in that cabal. One at a time, I’d take them down, regardless of the collateral damage.

I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

* * *

I woke up to a surge of mana and the sound of collapsing stone grating against itself. Alarmed, I bolted upright, only to quickly realize that whatever was happening wasn’t centered on me. I climbed to my feet and looked out over the city to spot a plume of dust billowing into the air a few blocks north of me.

The sun hadn’t yet finished creeping over the horizon, but in the pre-dawn light, I could see people running through the streets. The smarter ones were moving away from the disturbance, but there was a ring of enforcers surrounding several blocks that were stopping people for some reason before letting them pass.

I was inside that ring, but I doubted it would be difficult to slip past the enforcers if it became necessary. It would probably be easier to just sit tight and wait for them to finish whatever they were doing, assuming it had nothing to do with me. But after my attack on a Wolf Pack stronghold last night, that might not be a safe assumption to make.

I tilted my head to one side and traced the plume back down to the building. Frowning, I cast a sharpened senses spell to get a better look. Unless I was very much mistaken, that was the building the street kids lived in. Someone with a whole lot of mana was there, and there weren’t a lot of reasons for a person like that to target a group of orphans struggling to not starve to death.

Unless they were looking for one particular kid, that was, one who’d been a nuisance and who they’d gotten a good look at through divination magic. If that was the case, it meant two things: first, a bunch of kids were having a real bad morning, and it was probably my fault. Second, a Wolf Pack mage was only a few blocks away.

I pulled my staff out of my phantom space and shadow leaped, once, then again, to land on the roof in the cloud of dust. Below me, I heard screaming voices. The smell of blood was in the air. Phantasmal step let me drop through the roof to land in the middle of the room where I’d found the kids splitting their stolen food when I’d first arrived in Derro.

It was covered in bodies and blood spatters now. Standing in the middle was a man who was six and a half feet of solid muscle holding a kid up by his throat – Tanner. The man looked over at me and said, “Huh. You came to me? Stupid of you, but good, because these kids didn’t know shit.”

The man flexed his hand and crushed Tanner’s throat, then threw him aside and advanced on me.