Book 2, Chapter 19

Almost the entirety of the roof was made of glass. I hadn’t seen a single piece since arriving in Derro, so finding a skylight over a hundred feet wide was unexpected, to say the least. It wasn’t all one piece, of course, but each pane was big enough that I could have used it as a bed, and there were hundreds of them all set into a metal framework that was anchored directly into the stone. The glass itself had some sort of glazing that made everything inside shadowy and indistinct. I’d seen that before; it was likely one-way.

My first thought was that it must have been miserably hot inside that building. There was a reason desert dwellings had small windows, and it wasn’t to deter thieves from crawling in through them. I dispelled that thought almost immediately after squatting down to study the skylight. The glass itself appeared to be normal, albeit most likely made with transmutation, but the framework had wards anchored to it.

My bet was that the runes were on the underside, but even without being able to see them, I could tell that they were heat wards, not unlike the ones in my shield ward amulet. On an average day, those runes drew the most mana out of the inscriptions just fighting off the relentless sun beating down on the wastes.

I couldn’t even begin to guess why Hyago had gone through the trouble of having an enormous skylight installed in his smuggling headquarters, unless of course Tanner was wrong about what this building was. He’d been right that something was happening here, but he’d been wrong about—or had lied about—enough of the details that I wasn’t willing to take anything he’d told me on faith anymore.

Either way, the skylight was bad news for me. It meant the interior would be well lit and that the spot I’d opened to use for hiding was exposed to the people inside the building. There was a thin border of two feet of stone all the way around the outside edge of the roof, but if anyone inside climbed up high enough on the side opposite from me, they’d be able to see me.

I would be better hidden inside the building clinging to one of the shadowed corners near the ceiling than I was right now on the roof. That meant my highest priority needed to be getting inside the building, which I couldn’t confidently do without checking for wards first. Given the thickness of the stone, if there was a ward layer on the inside, I was going to have some difficulty feeling for it manually.

For buildings, that was rarely the case. Wards were meant to protect, which meant they usually went around the exterior. I was reasonably confident that this building wasn’t warded beyond the skylight itself. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to settle for only being reasonably confident. Ward Scanner was a relatively expensive divination, but I had the mana to spare thanks in part from the gains I’d gotten from the enforcers.

The spell took me ten seconds to cast, ten long seconds where I was vulnerable to detection from the people I could see inside the building. When I was done, I placed a hand flat on the roof and sent a pulse of magic through the entire building. The skylight’s wards jumped out at me immediately, no surprise there. As I’d expected, the building itself wasn’t warded, but there were wards on the sewer tunnel leading into it. There would have been no way for Tanner to sneak in there without me handling them.

There was another set of wards on a partitioned area in the southeast corner of the floor, possibly a vault or Hyago’s personal quarters. I could only speculate on what those wards did unless I wanted to get close enough to touch them or spend considerably more mana on even stronger divinations. Seeing mana through a divination was not impossible, but it was difficult and expensive. Since I didn’t care about that vault or the sewer entrance, I didn’t bother investigating further.

It seemed Hyago was not ambivalent toward his security, but neither was he rich enough to afford a full suite of detection wards. Otherwise, the entire building would have been shrouded in a ward that alerted them as soon as anyone not keyed to the ward itself entered. Since there wasn’t anything like that running, I felt safe using phantasmal step to sink through the roof and spider climb to hold my position in the shadowy upper corners. The amount of sunlight spilling in through the skylight would just make it even harder for anyone to see me.

Harder, but not impossible. There were a number of invocations that could banish the shadows to the caster’s eyes, and at least one person in the building had enough mana in their core to cast it. It was best not to linger out in the open with only the darkness to protect me.

It was only as I started to seriously look around for a better observation spot that I realized what I was seeing. The skylight wasn’t some arbitrary aesthetic decision. Row upon row of planters had been placed in the floor in the center of the building and even as I watched, six men entered from the sewer tunnel carrying heavy metal buckets full of water. Some sort of overseer started directing them to various rows to water the plants growing out of soil that looked far richer than anything else I’d seen since being reborn in the wastes. It was even beating out the greenhouses back at the Arbor.

This was a grow operation, though it was too soon to tell what exactly they were trying to accomplish. Plenty of plants served as base components for various drugs. They could be making healing ointments, or it could be street drugs that did anything from cause mild euphoria and hallucinations to fracturing the user’s psyche. Or it could be neither. Perhaps alchemy wasn’t as dead of a discipline as I’d initially thought. I certainly hadn’t seen much to convince me otherwise up to this point, but this wouldn’t be the first indoor herb garden I’d come across.

I had a suspicion that this wasn’t the only place like this in the district. The people guarding the place were one thing, but it didn’t take half a dozen men to take care of a few hundred feet of planters. One person could have done it full-time. Two people could have tackled it as a side project. Six was massive overkill, unless they were going to finish this site in an hour and then move on to the next one.

None of this was relevant to me. I wasn’t here to steal from these smugglers, just to borrow their sewer tunnel leading under the wall. If it didn’t work out, I might be able to find my own elsewhere, but that would involve a lot of earth reading, which was both tedious to perform and time-consuming. My self-imposed clock to hunt down and neutralize the Wolf Pack before they could launch any new attacks against my home village wouldn’t allow me to spend weeks looking. It would probably be faster to just pick an abandoned building somewhere and dig my own tunnel than it would be to find an intact stretch of sewers.

Before I invested the mana and time into any of that, I needed to see if the tunnel here went where Tanner thought it would. To do that, I needed to get inside, preferably without being noticed. If my suspicions about the grow operation was correct, the workers would be finishing up and moving on to their next location soon, but the others would remain.

I didn’t like my odds for remaining unnoticed that long, and I had no idea if the security in the tunnel would grow stronger or weaker later on. I could get past what was here now, if I was willing to pay the price.

I scuttled across the wall until I was directly over the hole in the floor on the north wall. The exposed sewer tunnel ran beneath it, just as dark and rubble-strewn as the one Tanner had led me through. I pulled my staff out, took a few seconds to build an invisibility spell in my head, triggered it at the staggering cost of two full cores worth of mana per second, and flung myself into the open air.

I was halfway to the floor before I cast weight reduction, which didn’t do a whole lot to slow me down in the time I had left. It was more to lessen the impact of hitting the floor to something manageable. It took me three seconds to touch down in the tunnel, then another two to scurry out of sight of the hole.

I let invisibility drop with a grimace and mentally examined the staff. Those few seconds had burned through all the mana I’d stolen from the enforcers and then a bit more besides. With a sigh, I placed my staff back in my phantom space. If this sewer tunnel didn’t lead to where it was supposed to, I was going to string Tanner up by his ears.

I walked into the darkness, my eyes sharpened with magic since I didn’t want anyone above noticing the glow of a light spell. After the first turn, I judged it safe enough to switch over to the cheaper and more effective method and summoned up a dimly glowing ball of magic, one that cast just enough to light to see about ten feet ahead of me.

There was good news and bad news. The tunnel was not as straight of a shot as I wanted it to be, but it did tend to go generally north. In all likelihood, it would pass under the wall. I might have already pushed past that threshold, for all I knew. The problem was that there was a whole mess of interconnecting lines down here, some collapsed and some not. Derro’s sewers hadn’t been laid out in anything remotely resembling a grid pattern either, which made navigating them all the more difficult.

I could get back if I needed to. Even without magic, my memory was good enough to retrace my steps. But I wasn’t trying to get back, and after half an hour of roaming around, building up a mental map of the dried up and unused sewer system below Derro’s streets, I still hadn’t found another way up to the surface, let alone one that led to the inner city.

There were spells that could help me here. Divination as a discipline excelled at gathering information, but I was a bit concerned about being detected by the mages I’d come to spy on. Very few mages with wards to detect divinations were content to merely block the spells from reaching them. Most mages wanted to know not only that someone was looking at them, but who that someone was and where they were. I didn’t have the distance to insulate me that I’d enjoyed during my scrying of the outer city.

I’d give it another hour or so. There didn’t appear to be anyone else down here and nobody had seen me go in. If I didn’t find an end to this chunk of sewers soon, then I’d reconsider spending mana on a scrying spell with a light touch, one that had a decent chance of beating out whatever detection wards might be lurking ahead.

If only I had another six mana crystals just like the one I’d placed in my staff. That would have been enough to blanket the whole inner city in a massive ward scanner, one that would give me far more information than the localized version I’d used earlier. Unfortunately, even creating that many would take me weeks, never mind trying to fill them.

Abruptly, the bricked walls of the sewer vanished into a wide-open darkness, some kind of massive sinkhole that had formed in the middle of the city. Even brightening my light spell to its maximum range didn’t give me enough to see the far side. The sinkhole itself was filled with water, its surface smooth, dark, and glassy. A small wooden boat was tied to a makeshift stone pillar about thirty feet away.

That was as good a clue as any that I was on the right track. Somebody was crossing this lake for some reason, else that boat wouldn’t be here. I stepped closer to the lake and frowned. There was mana down there, something big. It was moving too, following my light orb as it drifted out over the water.

“Some kind of mana-sniffing aquatic monster,” I muttered, watching intently as ripples formed across the surface of the underground lake.

Water exploded into the air as something vast lunged up out of the lake, reaching for my spell and ripping the mana out of it.