Book 2, Chapter 44

I made a detour back down into the sewer tunnels to drain away more mana from the traps left behind. There wasn’t a lot left, but I had time to kill while I waited for night so I could begin navigating toward the building I’d decided was most likely the home of Velvet. There were only so many that were large enough to be suitably castle-like, after all.

Moving across the inner city would have been easier if I’d had a mask like the one I’d destroyed, but it also would have been prohibitively expensive. Keeping one or two people from noticing me was inside the realm of possibility, but the more people the enchantment had to affect, the faster the mana drained. There’d been a reason Yano had kept his hood up while he followed me. In all likelihood, he’d been using the mask specifically on just me. Trying to use it to walk completely undetected down a street full of people would have drained it dry in under a minute.

That was why I’d waited for nightfall. It was easier to blend into the shadows and far less expensive to use mana to hide my movements, especially since there was only a single moon in the sky tonight. Even so, I had my doubts that I’d make it to what was practically a castle a mile away from my current location without being forced to expend large amounts of mana.

People wrapped up their errands and chores and retired to their homes, but the enforcer presence actually increased after the sun went down. They marched along in groups of two with crude light orbs bobbing along in the air behind them, casting their shadows out onto the streets as they patrolled their routes.

I moved as quickly and silently as I could without the aid of magic, which was to say not really all that fast. Even at a dead sprint, I could barely match an adult’s steady jogging speed. More than once, I was forced to scurry into an alleyway or around the corner of a house or business to dodge an incoming patrol. I’d wait a minute or two for them to go by, then continue on my way.

If anyone had been using a dark vision spell to see beyond the range of their light orbs, I’d have needed a completely different approach, one that probably would have involved retreating for now, acquiring better clothes to blend in, and possibly creating my own attention-diverting enchantment to help me cross the distance to my destination.

Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. It took me the better part of an hour of creeping down backstreets and dodging enforcers, but eventually I reached the four-story monstrosity of a building. I’d devoted a significant portion of my scrying efforts to mapping it out, mostly due to its size and the amount of security around it.

Noctra’s manor had been light on wards. There had been a few here and there, but for the most part, anyone who could pick a lock would have had the run of the place. The castle here was different. It had its own walls separating it from the rest of the inner city. Those were both warded and patrolled, similar to the Repository I’d scoped out, and I planned on bypassing them with the same tactic. I was going to hand-shape the enchantment the guards had that exempted them from triggering the wards.

That strategy would actually get me through quite a few wards inside as well, though my scrying had revealed a few places that would require different spells. One of those places was a rather large archive in the second level subbasement, which was going to be my first stop. I had an almost empty phantom space just itching to be stuffed to the brim with various pilfered books and treasures.

Thoughts on how to penetrate the castle’s defenses occupied my mind while I crossed the inner city, but once I actually arrived, I narrowed my focus down to the immediate problem. Ideally, I’d get in, take what I needed, and leave with no one the wiser. More realistically, I was probably about to kill a handful of people who had the simple misfortunate of getting in my way.

Unlike the streets, there were more than enough men to guard the entire length of wall without anyone having to patrol back and forth, which meant there were no gaps I could exploit to slip through. I still wanted to make it past unseen, if only because having the alarm raised five seconds after I got inside the castle was going to make everything else I did that much harder.

I spent a few minutes scanning the length of the wall using a sharpened senses invocation combined with dark vision in hopes of finding an inattentive or even sleeping guard. I didn’t find any, but I did find a section of wall that only had a single person there. That was about as weak a defense as I was going to find, and if I wasn’t going to get lucky, I’d make an opening instead.

It was easy to sneak up to the base of the wall. Guarding something like this place in the middle of a fortified city, with no real enemies to speak of and a thousand neighbors who probably knew better than to so much as glance at the castle when they walked by, was boring enough to make even the most diligent soldier lazy. It was dark, and no one was expecting an attack. Once I got close enough to reach the lone guard fifteen feet above me, I cast a sleep spell on him.

Then I scaled the wall with a burst of magic, all the while holding the enchantment key stable in a mana pattern outside my core, and passed by the sleeping form. The lack of patrols meant I’d have some time before he was discovered, hopefully an hour or more. I went over the back side of the wall and into the courtyard undetected.

There was no easy way to do the next part. I just needed to stick to the shadows, keep quiet, move quickly, and hope that no one noticed me crossing the open grass of the courtyard. At least it was soft grass that made no noise rather than the typical prickly yellow scrub grass I’d grown accustomed to since my reincarnation.

There were two trees in the courtyard, which was itself about two hundred feet of open space from the wall to the building. Both trees were closer to me than my destination, which gave me some cover for the first half of the run, but left me wide open for the second half. No matter how I did it, there was going to be a spot where anyone who looked in my direction would see someone running across the lawn.

Unless I used magic to cheat, that was. Shadow cloak was my spell of choice for a nighttime infiltration and the main reason I’d even waited until dark. It was relatively inexpensive, though still costly enough that I’d use an entire core of mana every five minutes or so. It wasn’t foolproof, either, being only an intermediate tier conjuration that lasted precisely as long as I was willing to continue pouring mana into the spell structure to hold it steady. There were dozens of ways to see through it, but I didn’t think it was likely that the guards here would have access to any of them.

I took a deep breath and started my run.

* * *

Really, the whole infiltration had gone far better than I’d had any right to expect. I’d made it inside the castle, successfully penetrating not one but two ward schemes, and thanks to what was probably an excessive amount of precautionary scrying, I’d managed to reach the basement archive undetected.

That was when I’d hit my first real snag. The archive was boxed in with a simple ward. The walls, ceiling, and floor were covered. That ward wouldn’t stop anybody from entering, nor would it attempt to defend the contents. The setup was what was known as a tattler. All it did was tell somebody that someone had walked in.

The easiest way to defeat it was to surround the entire tattler ward with another, larger ward that muffled the magic. Easy was not the same as cheap, however, and I would bankrupt myself in the process. I couldn’t think of anything more foolish than standing in the middle of an enemy fortress without a lick of mana to defend myself with.

That left the hard way, which was to starve the ward of mana. It was easiest to accomplish that by preventing anyone or anything from feeding it and waiting for the ward to fall on its own, but that could take weeks or even months. In some cases, wards could last for years. The ones I’d left on my own vaults would stand for about three centuries if nobody attacked them.

Actively draining a ward was a whole different set of challenges under normal circumstances. Plenty of wards had traps built into them designed to go off at the first sign of tampering, so draining a tattler without setting it off added another layer of complications to that task. Since all it did was alert someone that someone was doing something in the warded area, they were notoriously trigger-happy.

All said and done, it took me about fifteen minutes to penetrate the ward scheme and find the portion of the spell that would send the signal to its owner. Then I ran into a new problem. The ward was hooked up to a ward stone, and draining it of power meant draining the entire stone. Disconnecting it wasn’t possible without accessing the ward stone itself.

The only remaining option was to bypass the ward, which was akin to passing through a net by stretching out the holes wide enough to accommodate me while simultaneously making sure not to damage them in the slightest, since any snapped threads would trigger the alarm.

It took more mana than I wanted, but I managed to gently pry a hole in the ward just large enough to block its coverage of the door. Then, while I was holding the ward open, I had to use another spell to unlock the door so I could slip inside.

I closed the door behind me and relaxed my grip in the ward. It slowly settled back into place, smoothed out under my guidance. I watched it closely to ensure that it wasn’t going to activate, wary since the whole point of a tattler ward was to alert somebody without letting the intruder know they’d been detected. Even someone with the ability to sense magic would have to keep a careful eye on the ward to ensure they hadn’t tripped it.

Only once I was finally convinced that I’d made it inside the ward box undetected did I allow myself to relax. As long as the owner of the castle didn’t decide he needed something out of this room, I was practically guaranteed to remain hidden for as long as I wanted to stay here. I didn’t plan to abuse that fact since I intended on taking anything that looked even mildly interesting, but it was good to know that I could take my time sorting through the archive.

I conjured a ball of light and started reading through the titles. The first few shelves were boring administrative and clerical files, though a brief skim did reveal the mana taxes from a dozen small villages in the basin being organized and distributed. It made for a dry read, but there was a lot of information to be gleaned from those columns and numbers.

I ran a finger along the spines of the reports until I got to the most recent year, then flipped it open. After a few minutes of skimming pages, I found what I was looking for. My home village, Alkerist, was reporting no mana, largely thanks to my actions, though it was only a small fraction of the total tax the cabal was gathering.

More importantly, two pages later, I found the list of how that mana was spent. Fully half was going to what I considered to be outer-circle mages, of which there were twenty-six. The other half, however, was divided up among a list of obvious code names.

Swarm: 3%

Monolith: 3%

Ash: 4%

Echo: 8%

Weaver: 21%

Velvet: 12%

Freak: 15%

Keeper: 8%

Monarch: 26%

I recognized five of those names. Flipping back a few months, I found Ebalnat’s name among the outer circle list. He’d disappeared from the roster after I’d killed him, and a new name had been added to replace him.

The outer circle wasn’t important to me. If they were all of similar strength to the few I’d already killed, they wouldn’t have the resources or power to hold the cabal together, at least not at a level where it would be a credible threat. But those nine names… those were the important ones.

The real question was if the list was complete. I hadn’t missed that Sibilant’s name wasn’t on the roster. Either he’d gotten himself killed, or his existence was secret. Flipping back through months of reports didn’t reveal any sign of him, either.

“Interesting,” I said.