Book 2, Chapter 46

I studied the woman’s sullen expression for a moment. Whatever was going through her head, she still wasn’t afraid for her life. Probably the fact that the person menacing her was a four-year-old contributed heavily to that lack of fear. My staff was so tall that I had to stand on my toes to touch the silver crook at the top. I wasn’t exactly intimidating.

Still, I would have thought the abduction, confiscation of her enchanted trinkets, and draining of her mana core would have drilled a bit of caution into her. Apparently, I was giving the girl too much credit. Even smacking her with a force dart hadn’t done more than take the fight out of her. She’d been convinced that she couldn’t beat me or escape, but not that her life was in danger.

“Let’s start with something simple,” I said. “You live in this castle?”

“Of course I do. Don’t you even know where you are?”

“I took a few guesses when I picked this target. Who’s your father?”

“Roenark Actalus, patriarch of House Actalus,” she said with a sneer.

“Mmm. Sure. Never heard of him. Does he go by any other names?”

“Never heard of—” she cut herself off. “How did you even get in here?”

“Irrelevant,” I told her. “Is your father the mage known as Velvet?”

“Wh- never heard of anyone named that,” she said, catching herself a moment too late.

I smiled. “Yes, you have.”

“No.”

“So is he Velvet? I don’t think he’s Weaver, but I could be wrong.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the girl insisted.

I spent some mana on mind read, just for a few seconds to confirm what I already suspected. -keep this little brat busy until the guards show up and run him through. Just deny, deny, deny until then.

That was a bit more vicious than I was expecting, but it wasn’t exactly a surprise. I was an intruder, after all, one who’d already demonstrated my hostility toward her. In the interest of making my time here productive, I needed to hurry this along.

“You’re obviously lying about something, and if you think anyone is going to hear your scream, you should know I’ve got an aura of silence hanging around the room. Now, I’d prefer that you answer me honestly, but if you want to keep stringing me along, well…”

I didn’t take any pleasure from torturing people. There’d been a time, close to two thousand years ago now, when I would have. I’d hated nobles like this girl, and it was with great satisfaction that I killed them in the most painful and messiest ways possible. Time and loss had tempered those tendencies until I’d grown in wisdom and realized how foolish all the hatred I’d carried around was. I’d made a conscious decision to invest my time and energy into more productive outlets.

I’d been a kinder old man because I had the power to afford that luxury. With so many options open to me and centuries of accumulated wealth, it cost me very little to find alternate ways to get what I wanted if someone tried to oppose me. It was the rare day that I’d come into direct confrontation with anyone after I’d become widely known as Keiran of the Night Vale.

I did not have that kind of power anymore. This girl might be innocent of any dealings with the Wolf Pack, but I wasn’t sure, and she was doing a poor job of convincing me. For now, I’d use something that didn’t leave any permanent damage.

“This spell is called mind spike,” I told her as I cast it.

* * *

The girl, Suzalia, was much more pliable after a few rounds with my preferred torture spell. She did remarkably well at resisting the pain, but it seemed she hadn’t been trained as a mage beyond learning how to activate the various enchanted trinkets she kept on her. That gave her some resistance to divination attacks, but without the discipline and willpower of a true mage, that only took her so far.

I quickly got the truth out of her, at least insofar as she knew it. Her father was associated with the Wolf Pak in some way, but she didn’t know exactly what. Suzalia had met multiple members of the cabal when they’d come to visit Lord Roenark, and was even able to identify the light- and dark-haired women from my surveillance spell as Echo and Ash, respectively.

The problem was that, while she knew her father was involved with the cabal, she didn’t know how. I pressed her quite hard on that one, even going so far as to use more mana up mind reading to confirm the truth, but she’d just assumed he was financially backing the cabal in exchange for favorable treatment and assistance in the games that nobles played with each other.

I didn’t believe that for a second. It seemed like I knew more about her sire than she did, at least on the subject of his magical proclivities. I hadn’t been able to confirm who he was in the cabal hierarchy, but the presence of the warded archive in his home was proof enough for me that he was involved somehow.

“I have one final question for you,” I said. “Your father, is he home now?”

“N-no?”

“You don’t sound sure.”

“If he is, I don’t know where he’s at or what he’s doing. It’s a big castle.”

That, I believed. Suzalia was rapidly running out of uses to me, leaving me to circle back around to my decision of whether or not to let her live. On the one hand, she was a non-combatant. She wasn’t a mage or a threat. On the other hand, even if I knocked her out, someone would find her eventually. I might be long gone by then, but she’d be able to tell them what I looked like and what questions I’d asked.

Tactically speaking, the right move was to kill her. It wasn’t her fault; she’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the only good reason to keep her alive was as a hostage, and having one of those would only slow me down. I wasn’t going to kill her because she was part of the cabal. She wasn’t my enemy.

I was going to kill her to protect myself.

“Thank you for your help, Suzalia. For what it’s worth, I have no quarrel with you personally.”

Her eyes widened and she leaped to her feet. Whatever else she might have been, she wasn’t stupid. She charged across the room to grab hold of me, or kick me, or maybe just tackle me. Whatever she was trying, my shield ward deflected her rush to the side without me budging even an inch. Before she could get back up, I finished my grasping hand spell.

I didn’t want the body to be found before I finished my work. For the moment, there was no one else on the floor, but I’d already wasted ten minutes questioning the girl. As soon as my magic finished its work, I’d be back on the move. I needed to cross the floor to the warded suite to poke around in it, then up a flight of stairs after that to get to that mysterious room at the top of the castle.

I straightened up the room while I waited. Then I took a few minutes to ensure I had the advanced ward key structure memorized before breaking it down. Those were the kinds of objects that scry spells loved to lock onto, and I didn’t want people running me down that way.

I stuck her corpse in my phantom space and walked out of the room.

* * *

I wouldn’t say I felt bad about killing Suzalia, but I did my absolute best to avoid running into anyone else. I’d gotten everything I needed to bypass every single ward I encountered, right up to and including walking into the bedroom suite. It was unoccupied, as I’d suspected. No matter – I was only here to rifle through the private library.

I did drop the body in the room, on a couch in the corner. It might have been slightly sadistic to leave Suzalia’s corpse there to be found since I was assuming this was her father’s room, but he was an enemy, and I needed to reclaim the space for all the books I planned on stealing from him. I didn’t have it in my heart to feel sympathy for a man who’d helped engineer the subjugation of thousands of people to enrich himself.

I might not actively hunt nobles anymore, but my feelings in regard to some of their more common practices and treatments of the peasant class hadn’t shifted much in all these centuries. The fact that he was a noble and most likely a member of the cabal that had preyed upon my own family only made it worse.

The first thing I did was scour the rooms for anything enchanted to steal or break. There was surprisingly little. I expected Lord Roenark Actalus to be wearing his most powerful items, but I’d also thought he’d have reserves or situational equipment that didn’t warrant being carried around every day. Perhaps that was stored in that last warded room.

There was a separate ward guarding his personal library, the first one I’d seen that Suzalia’s ward key couldn’t get me past. Unlike the tattler ward on the archives, this was designed to physically repel anyone trying to enter who wasn’t directly keyed to the ward. The most likely case there was that Roenark himself was the only one who could get in.

Well, him and me. It took me about five minutes to figure out how to trick the ward sensors into ignoring me, then another ten seconds to get the door unlocked. I strode into a dark room and cast a ball of light up into the air to reveal the vault I’d seen in my scrying. Its exterior was lined with books, while the center was given over to two padded chairs with a shared end table between them. Another full-sized table sat behind the chairs, made of some richly-stained wood that I didn’t recognize.

I ignored the furnishings in favor of the bookshelves. I was specifically looking for history books that would clue me in to what exactly had happened on this island and how widespread the damage was. How far did I need to travel to escape this mana desert, and what could I expect to find between me and that goal?

My hope was that, as an educated and powerful noble, he would have some clues here, and after a few minutes of searching, I thought I’d found a winner. The book was titled On the Rise and Fall of the Kingdom of Ralvost, which I hoped was the old name for wherever I was. If I was extremely lucky, there’d be a section devoted to calendars that might allow me to finally figure out just how long I’d been stuck in the reincarnation cycle. Despite the soul invocations functioning perfectly, it was beyond obvious at this point that I hadn’t been returned immediately like I had planned.

I spotted a few more interesting books to flip through, including a trio of atlases that looked to be a hundred years old or better, and one called Heaven’s Judgment that looked to be mostly propaganda, but listed the supposed ruler of Derro, the Hierophant, as its author. It was no treasure trove of ancient spellbooks, but with a little luck, it just might finally give me a few of the answers I’d come to Derro to find.

With that accomplished, I pilfered as many books on working magic as I could find. It wasn’t that I needed them so much as anything I could do to cripple the enemy’s capabilities was a win in my mind. Besides, there might be something interesting in there. I left a single enchantment behind on that table between the two chairs, a delayed explosion that would rip the rest of the room apart in half an hour. It probably wouldn’t destroy all the books, but it was better than nothing.

I glanced at Suzalia’s corpse once on my way out, then shook my head and refocused on the reason I was here. I still hadn’t found Velvet, and there was only one place left to look.