Book 2, Chapter 39

I wasn’t terribly surprised to see a familiar face waiting for me with the group that hadn’t left the house. There wasn’t a lot of detail to be gleaned about a person based just on my sense of their mana, but one of those things was relative size. Mana was in the chest, and based on where exactly I could feel it, I knew that one of the people waiting for me wasn’t an adult.

He was the boy I’d met with Tanner a few days ago, the one who’d been worried about being abducted and forced into Blue Rat’s gang. It looked like his fears had been well-founded. Maybe he’d even gone willingly, knowing he’d end up there either way and figuring that it would be easier on him if he didn’t resist.

The boy watched me, wide-eyed, as I followed Rat-tail and his friend to a staircase that curled down into the darkness of the sewers. The other adults moved to surround me from behind with the boy trailing after them, a move that might have made me nervous if I could sense enough mana to do more than light a candle from any of them.

“Grab hold of this rope line,” Rat-tail instructed me, pointing to a thin thread of the stuff that had been tacked up like a handrail. “We’ll keep you going the right direction. You ever walked in the sewers before? It’s pitch-black down there.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “In fact…”

I sent a little orb of light ahead of me, startling the gang members. “Um,” one of them said. “What the hell was that?”

“Magic?” another asked sarcastically.

Rat-tail gave me a speculative look. I got the impression he was the only one in the group who knew anything about magic at all. He was probably wondering why he couldn’t feel any mana in me when he’d just seen me cast a spell, and if he was an adept like I was starting to suspect, he might also be wondering how I’d done it without using any sort of verbal incantation to help me.

I was more than happy to let those little mysteries stew in his mind. Maybe it’d make him think twice about trying to attack me if this meeting went sour. I gestured for him to lead the way after a moment. He glanced back at the rope still held in his hands, then laughed quietly and let it fall. Together, we all marched down the steps and into the sewers.

* * *

The gang hideout was not an impressive structure. We took a winding path through the sewer, though I wasn’t sure if it was because it was the only way or if they were deliberately trying to confuse me. I suspected the latter, and if so, they utterly failed. It wouldn’t have mattered if they had managed it. I didn’t need to trace my steps back to get out.

Once we reached the end of the route, we ascended back up to street level inside some sort of office building. It was one of the largest places I’d seen in Derro, or at least that’s what it looked like from the inside. There were three levels overhead and the stonework was in good enough shape that the people here were relying on daylight coming in from the windows to see.

There were no holes in the walls anywhere that I noticed, and the windows themselves were thin, horizontal slits near the ceiling, though there were plenty of them. Luckily for the ones on the ground floor, the building’s interior was an open atrium, letting light shine down from the floors above too. It lacked the skylight Hyago’s grow room had, but the windows must have been bigger higher up because there was still enough light to see by.

We got some curious glances from the men and women in the middle, but no one made a move to stop us. A quick glance around showed me more blue ink rat tail tattoos on some of them, perhaps as some sort of officer mark. It seemed like a bad idea to me—did he just kill everyone he demoted later on—but I wasn’t here to critique Blue Rat’s organizational skills.

A pair of armed guards flanked a set of stairs leading up to the second level, but they let us pass without more than a glance at Rat-tail when he led us through. The four behind me peeled off, leaving just the two in front and myself. I mentally tracked the boy’s mana as he walked away, but he didn’t linger in the building and was underground again soon after we’d finished climbing the stairs.

We went up two flights and stopped one level from the top. There, I lost the other man from my escort, leaving me with just Rat-tail for the moment. “Right through here,” he told me, gesturing toward a door right across from the stairs.

There were six sources of mana behind that door, assuming there were no wards to hide anything. Thus far, I’d seen no sign of any sort of magical protections, but if they were going to be anywhere, this was the place. I sent out a quick pulse of life sense, which matched what my mana perception was telling me, and then prepared a conjuration that would send an explosion of force darts out in every direction and held it primed in my mind, just in case there were any surprises.

Rat-tail opened the door and led me into an antechamber past two more guards, these ones with what looked like sledgehammers held in their hands. They flanked the door on either side, and other than glancing over at Rat-tail as he walked through, they were motionless and silent. I walked past them into the main part of the room.

The man I assumed was Blue Rat was sitting with his feet up on a desk that had obviously been made with magic. It looked to be carved entirely from a single piece of wood, but a tree that size would have dwarfed anything I’d seen growing in the wastes, including the old growth in the valley I’d relocated my family too. No doubt, it was meant to be an ostentatious show of wealth, but I’d seen thousand-pound statues made of pure gold and entire palaces constructed out of crystallized mana. A wood-warped desk wasn’t going to impress me. Rat-tail gave him a quick bow and backed out of the room. The others ignored him.

“So you’re the one who did the enforcers?” the man asked. “Shit, you don’t look like much.”

“Blue Rat?” I asked, ignoring the question.

“That’s me. Who’re you?”

“Keiran.”

A pair of women were lounging on an overly-padded couch pressed up against the wall to my right. One of them leaned forward, the movement drawing both my and Blue Rat’s attention, though for different reasons. For me, I was on edge, not precisely expecting an attack, but ready to handle it if one came. For Blue Rat, I had no doubt the ample cleavage practically spilling out of her low-cut top was what drew his eyes.

“He’s adorable,” she practically squealed.

The other woman, a tall, slim lady with her hair cut into a straight, no-nonsense bob, looked up from a book she was reading, glanced once at me, then rolled her eyes and ignored us. When her friend didn’t get the reaction she wanted, she grabbed the book reader’s shoulder and shook her. “Look, Myumi, he’s so tiny!”

“So what?” she asked, not looking up again.

“Ladies, if you don’t mind,” Blue Rat said, an edge in his voice.

“Sorry, Bluey.”

“Do not call me that.”

I still had the force blast spell primed in my mind, but no one seemed all that threatening so far. There was, however, one more person I hadn’t gotten a chance to gauge yet. He was standing in the back corner, behind Blue Rat. Of all the people in the room, he was the most interesting to me. He didn’t have more mana than anyone else, but he was wearing a mask enchanted to repulse attention. No one else in the room looked in his direction or acknowledged his existence in any way. I wondered if they even knew he was there.

He was short for an adult, just barely over five feet tall. From what I could tell behind the mask, he’d shaved his head, and he was covered from the neck on down in plain, somber browns—typical desert clothes—that even included a pair of gloves. I spotted a knife on a belt sheath and a brace of what appeared to be throwing needles strapped to one forearm. His eyes were a sharp, piercing blue that were locked on me.

“You’re a mage?” Blue Rat asked, drawing my attention back to him.

“Does it matter?”

“Little bit, yeah. If you’re not a mage, then I find it hard to believe you raided an enforcer tower. If you are a mage, then I find it hard to believe that you’re as young as you look.”

“I am a mage, and I’m not as young as I look,” I told him. “Why don’t we get to the point of this meeting? You want something.”

Something ugly lurked behind Blue Rat’s eyes, something cruel. Here was a man who wouldn’t balk at killing children or anyone else that got in his way. I’d seen his type before. He’d be dangerous if he had a lick of real power, but resources were too scarce to allow people like him to grow. Anyone with any sense knew better than to teach someone like him magic, lest he inevitably turn it on them. Blue Rat was left with nothing but what he could scavenge from those too weak to fight back.

It was probably my apparent age that made him target me. Whatever he wanted, he thought he could bully me into giving it to him. I gave it even odds between me ending up getting what I wanted from him and me ending up killing everyone in the room before I left empty-handed. My eyes didn’t quite flick to the silent bodyguard in the back corner again, but only through an effort of sheer will.

“Your little stunt, if it really was you, is causing me problems. I’ve got a thousand enforcers up my ass, busting my men on the streets, confiscating my merchandise, disrupting my operations,” Blue Rat said. “But hey, I know it wasn’t your fault. You weren’t trying to make my life difficult. So I’m willing to let it slide. I just want you to do one thing for me.

“You see, I run this part of the city’s underworld, but I’m sharing Derro with sixteen other guys just like me. And the ones nearby, they’re laughing their asses off. So I want you to do what you did to the East Tower again over in their territories. I want to be the one laughing. Only, I want you to do it when I say, so I can take over their areas.”

“You want me to kill a few dozen enforcers in their homes,” I said. “Okay. I could. What’s in it for me?”

Blue Rat laughed and spread his hands. “What do you want?”

“I want into the inner city,” I said. “You’ve got people all over the old sewer tunnels. You must know one that goes under the wall.”

“Ah,” the gang leader said. “Now that, that I think I could help you with. Let’s talk specifics.”