Book 2, Chapter 45

The archives hadn’t held all the answers I’d hoped to find, but I had learned enough interesting information from them that it had been worth the effort to break in. There was a private library a few floors up attached to a suite of rooms I also planned to investigate, and if possible, I was going to drain the ward stone dry on my way out. That would most likely break it beyond repair, but that was just a bonus in my mind.

There was one other spot I was interested in checking out. It was a room on the top floor, heavily warded, even more so than the archive room I was sitting in, and with things far more dangerous than a tattler ward. If I made a mistake getting through those wards, they’d do their best to kill me. Even my scrying spells hadn’t had enough oomph to get through them, leaving me with only a hazy impression of the room’s size and suspicions about its contents.

It was going to be my second-to-last stop, just before the ward stone, in part because it was the most well-protected area in the castle, and in part because all of my scrying hadn’t located the mage known as Velvet, and if he was in the castle, that was the only place left to look. My only proof that I was in the right place came from the records I’d found here in the archive and the hazy visions I’d gotten from object reading Yano’s mask – and that didn’t mean I was right about this castle belonging to Velvet. Even if it did, it was possible he just wasn’t home.

But I hadn’t come this far just to give up because things got a bit harder to handle at the last step. My next task was to get back out of the archive without setting off the wards. For most wards, that would be considerably easier, since they were generally designed to keep things from getting in, not the other way around. In this case, tattlers only cared about things crossing the line of the ward, not about which direction they came from.

I took my time browsing the rest of the archive, but there was little of interest left. I found a few stacks of beginner spellbooks and swiped them to read later. If I was lucky, they’d be of use to the fledgling apprentices I’d left at my new home. More realistically, they’d probably be full of awful advice, and I’d end up throwing them out.

I also found some empty books waiting to be filled and a supply of loose paper, pens, and ink. Those weren’t terribly important, but I had wanted some supplies of my own and I had the space. If I found something more interesting later and needed to reclaim that little corner of my phantom space, I’d just jettison them. For the time being, that was one chore I could cross off my list.

Once I was sure there was nothing left of interest for me, I set about the tedious process of peeling back the ward so I could pass through it undetected, then gently sliding it back into place. After I was free, I started scrying ahead of me as I moved. It wasn’t efficient, but since I was planning on recouping all my spent mana by draining the ward stone on my way out, I prioritized speed at this point. I charted a course that kept me from encountering anyone and dodged around as many wards as possible, though there were a few I was able to simply pass through by convincing them I was a member of the staff.

I got a lucky break on the third floor and ran into someone with a different type of ward key. She was somewhere between fifteen and twenty years old, dressed in frills and lace, silk and jewelry. Whoever she was, she certainly looked important. Her core was almost completely full of mana, too. It was entirely possible she was a mage, in which case she’d likely be able to fight back against an enchantment spell like sleep.

Her eyes widened when she spotted me, and she opened her mouth to say something. Before she could, I wrapped us both in an aura of silence. Whether she’d been about to call for help or cast a spell, I’d interrupted her. If she was a competent mage, she’d switch to something she could cast silently, and I’d trust in my shield ward to protect me.

Either way, it took only a few seconds for me to put together the same strangling hand spell I’d used on the enforcers when I’d rescued Tanner. No amount of willpower was going to prevent her from going unconscious.

While she drummed her heels silently against the carpeted floors, I forced open a nearby door leading into an empty sitting room and dragged her inside. By the time I closed the door behind us, she’d stopped fighting back. I pulled my staff out of my phantom space and cast sleep on her to keep her that way once I was sure she wouldn’t resist it, then I released the strangling hands spell and gave her a once over.

The necklace was the ward key, but it was tuned specifically to her. Taking it would deprive her of access to specific areas of the house, but it wouldn’t grant them to me. I swiped it anyway to make a copy that was attuned to me and to drain the mana later. She also had a bracelet that was enchanted to resist heat, though it was so weak that it took me a moment to realize it wasn’t a defensive object. It was just to keep her cool when walking around outside.

The ribbon in her hair was enchanted with a weak glamour designed to draw attention to its owner and cause mild infatuation. The effect was so slight that it would be hard to detect, which was probably the point. It would give an edge in a social situation, but it wouldn’t warp people to her will. Now that I thought about it, that ribbon might have been what caused me to take notice of her as someone important in the first place.

Lastly, a ring made of some smooth, polished stone adorned her finger. It was a small mana crystal, maybe five times bigger than my own core. That would be harder to drain and probably not worth the effort, but it was interesting in that it looked to be far better crafted than any other mana crystals I’d come across since my rebirth.

I took all of it, then hit her with a mana drain as well. Her core was three times bigger than mine and completely full, so even with the spell cost, I still gained plenty from draining her. Then I broke down the enchantments in everything except the ward key necklace as well. The heat sink bracelet was a neat idea, but people around here had no concept of efficient and elegant designs. My own shield ward did the exact same thing, except with a runic inscription that used a fifth of the mana.

It took me about three minutes to replicate the new ward key, which gave me access to everything the one I’d copied painstakingly from studying guards via scrying as well as several other warded areas in the castle. That included the suites of rooms on this floor. Since one of those was my destination, this was a bit of a stroke of luck for me. I’d fully planned on breaking through the ward when I got there, but this would save me some time.

I had one last complication to consider. Did I want to kill this woman? My first instinct was to say yes. She obviously lived here. She had a full core of mana and might be a mage. That meant she had a connection to the Wolf Pack and was an enemy, at least indirectly. Presumably, if she’d been one of the inner circle with their codenames, she wouldn’t have been defeated quite so quickly and easily, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t someone important.

Were there any advantages to keeping her alive? I might extract some information from her, but I couldn’t take her with me, and this was hardly a secure room to work in. I could place some of my own wards to buy me some time, but if she was important and someone started missing her while we were busy, it could lead to being interrupted and pulled into a fight before I accomplished the rest of my goals.

In the end, information was what I was here for. This woman looked important and might know things. It was worth it to spend some of the mana I took from her to question her. If it came down to a fight, well, there wasn’t a lot of difference between one body and ten.

I took a minute to set up a new aura of silence, this one shaped like a shell around us so that we could talk without being overheard, and broke my sleep spell. The woman’s eyelids fluttered immediately, and she sat up with a gasp.

She focused on me for an instant, then let out an ear-splitting shriek. I let that go on for a second before I got annoyed and used a cheap trick I’d learned many, many years ago. As it turned out, if there was no air, people couldn’t speak, and elemental manipulation did a good enough job of pulling it away from someone’s mouth that it was possible to momentarily gag someone who just couldn’t shut up with a simple novice tier spell.

It didn’t work completely, of course. For one, it wasn’t possible to form a complete vacuum with such a weak spell, so it was more a noise reducer than a silencer. For another, all a reasonably intelligent person needed to do was take a step in any direction to get clear of the effect. It was mostly useful for shock value, to let someone know that I was sick of hearing the sound of their voice.

Surprisingly, this woman appeared to be familiar with the trick. She took a step back while staring daggers at me and said, “Who do you think you are?”

“Keiran,” I said.

“Keiran?” she repeated. “Am I supposed to recognize that name?”

I shrugged. “You asked.”

She drew herself up to stare down at me, then blinked in surprise and patted at her hair for her ribbon. I let a smirk curl my lips and said, “It wouldn’t have worked on me anyway.”

“I don’t know what game you think you’re playing here, little boy, but you just wait until I call the guards. My father will have you beaten bloody and raw for this.”

She’d sure swung from terrified to overbearing in a hurry. I supposed that once the shock of the situation had left her, she’d recovered that famed noble arrogance so many of them possessed. The young ones, especially, thought they were invincible, that nothing bad could possibly happen to them. They were too smart, too strong, too wealthy. There would be consequences to anyone who dared raise a hand against them. They had guards and servants and their families.

This wasn’t the first time I’d dealt with this attitude, and I’d always found a bit of violence worked wonderfully to adjust their opinions on their own mortality. I flicked a finger and sent a weak force dart into her stomach.

The noble girl barely had a moment to recognize the magic as it flew through the air before she was thrown backwards to crash into a side table and went sprawling to the floor. “How dare you!” she snarled at me with murder in her eyes.

I suspected that was the point she realized there was no mana in her core. The fight seemed to drain out of her all at once, and the only move she made was to stand up, then flounce back down into a chair. “Well,” she said. “You obviously want something. Go on, then!”

“I do have some questions, now that you mention it.”