Book 2, Chapter 38

The wards shielding my hideout from detection were still active. I was almost certainly safe here, but I couldn’t see any good reason to risk hanging around. Other than the mana I’d invested in the place, I had no connection or attachment to this particular building.

I gathered the leech stones, only because they had a bit of mana in them and it wasn’t enough to justify the effort to pulling it all back out, and placed them in my satchel. On the off chance I needed to make some money out of any of them, it’d be slightly less mana to finish working with these ones.

It took me thirty seconds to erase all lingering traces of my presence, not including the wards and the teleportation beacon. If anyone was staking out my hideout, they were too late to catch me.

After abandoning the place, I set off deeper into the city. Thus far, I’d stuck mostly to the east side except for my one foray to the southern section, and if anyone was looking for me, that was the most likely place they’d find me. Relocating to the north or west quarters was a good precautionary measure.

I also needed to have a discussion with Tanner. He’d grossly misrepresented his knowledge and access to a tunnel leading to the inner city, but at the end of the day, he’d pointed me in the right direction. Never mind that no normal kid would have been able to bypass those defenses. He hadn’t really lived up to his end of the bargain, but I felt like I owed him at least a little bit.

It was late enough in the day that the street kids had already scattered to do whatever business they occupied their time with. If it was anything like my own memories, it involved a lot of skulking around looking for places to steal from without getting caught and going home hungry when I realized that people in general weren’t so stupid as to leave anything unattended if they wanted to keep it.

But every now and then, the right set of coincidences would line up, or, if we got desperate enough, we’d band together and manufacture those coincidences. That was likely what they’d done when I’d first met them at that farmer’s wagon. I hadn’t stuck around to watch the whole thing, but the fact that something like two dozen children had hit the wagon and bolted in every conceivable direction without a single one being caught made it pretty clear it wasn’t a crime of opportunity.

The dull shard I’d used to trace Tanner’s location last time was still in my possession, but I’d already burnt out his essence with my previous tracking spell. It had been a weak link the first time, and after a minute of fiddling with it, I decided there just wasn’t enough left to work with. I didn’t need to speak with Tanner right now, or really ever again if it was going to be a huge hassle, but I knew where to find him this evening.

For now, I’d explore on my own.

* * *

Derro hadn’t exactly been a cheerful place when I’d first arrived, though at the time I was too distracted to pay much attention to it. Now, there was a definite feeling of unease in the air. More than once, I spotted blood stains on the walls of buildings or saw the scars left by conjurations levied against the citizens.

Enforcers marched up and down the streets in droves, their storage crystal batons clenched in their hands. Rarely did I see them in groups smaller than three, and never alone. They cast angry glowers at anyone and everyone, and people cowered from them in turn.

It would be a lie to say I’d been expecting my attack on one of their towers to be ignored, but I could admit I was surprised by the sheer number of them that had taken to the streets. My best guess was that other towers and the inner city had sent out reinforcements and overcompensated to patrol the area.

“You there!” someone shouted.

I glanced behind me and saw a trio of enforcers descending on a nondescript man who looked to be in his twenties. From the panicked look on his face, I supposed he’d been caught doing something or another. Maybe he was a pickpocket.

Whatever his crimes were, he turned and fled from the enforcers as soon as they started yelling. One of them lifted his baton and chanted a short litany that I didn’t catch from so far away. A conjured rock the size of my fist whipped through the air and struck the fleeing man in the back of the head, dropping him to the ground in a limp sprawl.

I frowned at that, not because I cared about the man the enforcers had attacked, but because of the way they’d done it. Specifically, because the enforcer had drained mana from his storage crystal when he still had plenty in his core. It was inefficient to do that. I knew those batons weren’t designed like my staff was to reduce transference loss. I’d examined plenty of samples myself.

Was this particular enforcer just dull-witted? Neither of the other ones seemed surprised by the way he’d cast that spell, which could point to him being a known quantity of idiocy. But it might also mean that he’d cast the spell correctly according to enforcer doctrine. The only reason to do that was if they’d been trained to rely on the storage crystals first and keep their cores in reserve just in case their weapons were taken from them.

If that was the case, was it reinforced the vague notion I had that enforcers weren’t actually mages. None of the ones I’d seen had enough mana in their cores to make it even worth draining them, which I hadn’t thought much of initially since neither did anyone else. The leech stones everyone carried around saw to that.

For my sake, I hoped the enforcers were at least adepts. The level of understanding people had about how magic worked back in Alkerist had been disappointing, to say the least. I was expecting more from the mages of Derro, but if they didn’t know how to ignite someone’s core, there was no way all the enforcers had become mages by accident.

If enforcers were adepts, I might have gotten my hopes too high about the quality of the libraries I planned to raid once I hunted down the rest of the Wolf Pack. On the other hand, Freak’s library had been a treasure trove of local alchemical information. He hadn’t had much in the way of history, geography, or politics, but it did prove that there were quality tomes to be looted.

After the enforcers finished hauling their brained victim off the streets, the regular citizens slowly crept back out from where they’d scurried off to. Most of them had ducked down the nearest allies or taken refuge inside any building that was accessible. The farther north I got, the more rundown the city appeared, with sometimes barely a single home still accessible in a block of houses. In the market squares, some effort had been made to restore function to the buildings, but it was still shoddy work by a transmutation mage’s standards.

Then again, a whole army of mages could descend on this city and it would still take months upon months to repair everything. These people were spending all their mana as a currency, one that presumably led back to the coffers of the inner city mages. It wasn’t reasonable to expect them to even know transmutation magic, let alone have the resources to use it. It very well could have been less work to build a new city somewhere else than to try to fix Derro.

While I walked, I occasionally cast a spell I hadn’t had much occasion to use since my reincarnation. Similar to how life sense showed me everything living nearby, and in greater detail than my ability to perceive mana possibly could, earth sense gave me a feel for what was going on in the ground below me. It was a highly situational divination, but perfect for what I wanted to check on.

Specifically, I was looking for sewer tunnels. The ones leading to Freak’s lair were all well and good, and I still planned on harvesting mana from that underground lake, but with the destruction of the teleportation beacon over there, I wanted a different way under the wall. While it was possible someone had deliberately collapsed all the other sewer tunnels leading into the inner city, I wouldn’t know without checking.

I was still a mile from the inner walls, far out of the range I was looking for, so I only used the spell intermittently to get a feel for intact lengths of sewer going south-west as a way to guide me in the right direction. The farther north I went, the more intact the whole system seemed to be, and I started sensing bits of mana underground. If I had to guess, I would say some people were living in the sewers for whatever reason.

Enforcer presence started to thin out until finally I could walk multiple streets without noticing one and the general attitude of the city slowly shifted from apprehensive fear to the typical stagnant apathy of impoverished people stuck in their ruts, living day in and day out with no hope for anything better. It wasn’t pretty, but it was common. These people knew there was no way out for them.

I wondered if killing the Wolf Pack would have any effect on their lives at all. It was entirely possible that there were plenty of other mages not affiliated with that particular cabal living in the inner city and that their deaths would change nothing, not even so much as saving Alkerist from predation by other mages. With my family finally agreeing to leave, I was far less concerned with the village’s future.

My motive now was to acquire resources quickly. The Wolf Pack was a convenient target that I wouldn’t feel bad about killing. I just needed to figure out how to get to them first, preferably one at a time so I could pick them off without them overwhelming me with numbers.

Six mana presences started ascending up toward the street into a nearby building, noteworthy to me only in that it marked the location of a sewer tunnel access point. Unfortunately, we were still far enough from the wall that I doubted I’d find a useful connection here and all of Derro’s streets looked enough alike that I probably wouldn’t be able to find it again without magic.

Two people walked out of the building onto the street in front of me. “That him?” one of them asked, shooting a glance my way.

“Must be. I can’t feel any mana at all.”

“He’s just a kid. Thought he’d be older.”

“Shut it. Come on.”

Someone was looking for me? That was a surprise. I wasn’t in the habit of leaving witnesses behind who might report on my activities. The only ones were the street kids, and they weren’t based anywhere near here. I studied the men for clues, and my eyes settled on a tattoo poorly inked on one of their wrists.

It was what appeared to be a rat tail, done in blue. I vaguely recalled Tanner and his friend had mentioned being afraid of a Blue Rat and his gang. They’d been forcefully recruiting preteens. Had one of those kids sold me out? I mentally moved finding Tanner up higher in my priority list.

“Hey, kid,” the one with the rat tail tattoo said. “I need you to come with us.”

“No thanks, I’m busy,” I told him.

Rat-tail snickered. “Got a pair on you, don’t you? Look, my boss wants to talk to you about this business of yours. Might be he could help you out.”

“I doubt I need help from anyone like him.”

The other guy bristled, but Rat-tail stopped him with an upraised hand. “Look, we know you were involved in killing those enforcers. Now, that made things a bit harder for us, but the boss thought it was hilarious. He just wants to talk, see if maybe you need a little help from the underworld.”

I started to refuse again, but then I stopped and frowned. “You guys know the city pretty well, huh? Above and below ground?”

“Of course we do.”

I checked my mana reserves. There was more than enough to shadow leap straight up to the surface from anywhere in the sewers if I needed to flee, and plenty to fight before I got to that point. My shield ward was also fully charged. Meeting with Blue Rat himself wouldn’t be that dangerous.

“Think you could get me to the inner city?”

Both men blinked in surprise at that, and Rat-tail let out a low whistle. “You’re going to raise all kinds of hell, aren’t you? You just come with us to talk to the boss, he’ll get you sorted out.”

I had more than enough mana to kill all six of them if I needed to, and I was curious. Rat-tail could sense mana well enough to know he couldn’t feel mine, so maybe Blue Rat knew a bit about what was going on behind the inner wall.

I followed the men back into the building.