Book 2, Chapter 16

Unlike the Repository, the enforcers tower had nothing in the way of wards. Perhaps no one thought it was necessary when the place was filled with adepts who specialized in violence. I’d initially mistaken them for true mages, but the more I studied them, the more convinced I became that each knew a handful of spells that they powered through the storage crystals capping their signature batons. They were dangerous due to their numbers, not their individual strength.

The true mages living behind the inner walls no doubt guarded their strongholds more thoroughly, but enforcers didn’t have that kind of budget. I knew because I spent ten minutes sitting not that far away from them, scrying the entire inner layout of the tower. The ground floor was administration, then barracks—including their armory—on the next two, and the top floor was split between three private suites and some sort of archive that I assumed was too sensitive to be open to the common enforcer, else it would have been located on the ground floor with the rest of the paperwork.

I wasn’t terribly interested in what was above ground, other than to note the positions of the enforcers and perhaps to spend a minute or two seeing if there was anything worth stealing from the archive. Of far more relevance to me were the two floors below ground. The first one had interrogation rooms and a few cells in it. The sub-basement was split between a large holding cell and what appeared to be a pair of torture chambers, though the equipment was shoddy and uninspired. I suspected the fact that the captives in the holding cell would act as an audience to the torture was really more the point.

There was no one currently mounted on the rack there, possibly because they hadn’t finished rounding up enough suspicious people yet, possibly because whoever specialized in torture wasn’t available. Maybe it was the man I’d killed yesterday. Whatever the reason, it meant I had some time to plan my attack.

Most of my time was spent debating whether or not I wanted to kill every enforcer there. I could, no doubt, and it would make my immediate goal far easier. Tanner was in the group holding cell in the sub-basement, which meant rescuing everyone else there by necessity. I wanted to do that anyway, since obscuring who exactly was being broken out would help shield us from reprisals.

But that only solved the immediate problem. This wasn’t the only enforcer outpost in Derro, and that wasn’t even considering what kind of response might come from the inner city. If losing one enforcer caused this much of a stir, then losing twenty was going to throw the whole city into turmoil. From a coldly rational standpoint, it was highly doubtful that it was worth it just to recover Tanner. I’d be better off waiting to see if the enforcers let him go with everyone else once they were satisfied with whatever they got, or to just find someone else to get me under the wall unnoticed.

Then I thought about that little girl being dragged by her arm while she fought desperately to get back on her feet, her face twisted up in pain. I thought of the other kids in that cell, caught because they were too slow or through bad luck. All of them were completely innocent, at least as far as the murder of an enforcer went. They didn’t deserve this.

Had I always had a soft spot for children? I’d certainly snuffed out enough young lives through sheer collateral damage in my more unhinged youth. Perhaps I was unconsciously trying to atone for that. I had spent quite a few centuries working to fix the various regions that I’d devastated with my magic as a young man.

I wasn’t sure I liked the implications of this train of thought. I already had enough concerns about how having a child’s brain was affecting my thinking. I was going to drive myself crazy trying to figure out if every thought I had was being tainted by my new existence, when the reality of it was that it was irrelevant. I’d been purely Keiran, but now I was also Gravin. I was going to have to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to be the exact same person I’d been in my previous life. The old Keiran might or might not have cared about the fates of those children, but it didn’t matter. The new me did care.

My mind made up, I used shadow leap to cross the distance between where I was standing and the outside of the tower. I landed next to the west wall and immediately cast phantasmal step to slip through the stone. I’d deliberately chosen this spot because I knew there was an enforcer inside that room, sitting at a desk being ground away under the wheels of bureaucracy.

Raw force could be shaped in a lot of ways. It was most efficient as a dart flung at high speeds, able to punch through armor and bone with relative ease as the force was concentrated into a small point, but that wasn’t always the best tool for the task. That shape had a tendency to make a considerable mess, one I wanted to avoid having splashed on me. I did not have a change of clothes and wasn’t inclined to deal with having to clean up the ones I was wearing.

So instead of a force dart to pierce the back of his skull, I created a collar of force and clamped it around his neck. The trick to successfully rendering an opponent unconscious was to fully choke off the blood flow to the brain, which was easy enough to do as long as the caster didn’t care about leaving marks on the body. It didn’t make much of a difference to my plans one way or another, but as a mark of professional pride, I decided to leave as much mystery in the killing as possible.

I applied carefully directed pressure to the man’s neck. He tried to leap to his feet as he grabbed at the invisible hand strangling him, but his physical strength wasn’t enough to overcome the force that had locked onto him. If he’d been wearing any sort of shield ward, it would have brushed the conjuration aside without trouble. If he’d been any sort of mage, he could have countered it easily. If he’d seen me coming, he could have fought back. If, if, if.

It only took seconds for him to pass out upright, held in place only by the band of force clamped onto his throat. The spell would persist for another ten minutes, eventually killing him from lack of air. He’d be braindead well before that point. It wasn’t a pretty death, but by the time the magic dissipated, he’d be a corpse without a mark on him. At least he’d be unconscious for it.

The biggest risk was that someone would find him and save him before he succumbed to the magic, but I was keeping track of everyone’s positions. I knew that there were two enforcers in the basement, one in the sub-basement, and six more on the floors above me. I’d know if any of them moved closer to the office my first victim was dying in.

I stalked through that tower, one floor at a time, casting a strangling hand spell on any enforcer I caught. I found a man napping in a chair. He died without ever realizing he was being attacked. Another enforcer was doing maintenance on the armory. I caught him just as he was turning around. We made eye contact for a few seconds before he passed out, the baton he’d been cleaning only half-raised to point at me before it clattered to the floor.

I stole the mana from those storage crystals and added it to my own reserves. Let whoever came to clean this up think the theft was what motivated the attack. It would be just one more layer of obscurement between me and the enforcers looking for me. It might make the Repositories harder to hit later, but that had never been about the mana, and I was fairly confident I’d unraveled enough of those defenses to have a decent idea of what I could expect to encounter in the inner city.

Then I stalked up the stairs to kill the enforcers up there. While I was working, two more enforcers had entered the building with more prisoners, but they’d gone straight into the basement. So far, my intrusion remained undetected. I wasted two minutes in the archive room, just to skim the titles on the shelves and confirm it was nothing but records. I’d hoped it would be sensitive information, but it appeared to just be paperwork from years gone by, shipped off to another storage room to make space for new paperwork. It was disappointing, but not unexpected.

With fully half of the enforcers dead or dying, it was time to start the hard part of this job. The first basement level was easy enough, containing no prisoners to witness my actions. I simply went down there, ready to use an aura of silence if needed, killed the two enforcers, and moved on. It was the one in the sub-basement, who’d have a few dozen witnesses, that would be a problem. I’d come back for him last, after I cleared the grounds.

I did not expect to get all of them using the same spell. I’d either have to use something much messier or I’d need to expend a great deal of extra mana to get them all at once. It felt wasteful, but then again, it was their mana in the first place. I went to the tower’s second floor and opened all of the doors, including those that were locked. It cost me a bit more mana to unlock them, but I wanted to be able to see outside the tower from every angle.

Force spells relied heavily on line of sight to work. Once I had everything set up, I’d need to be able to run from room to room in a hurry to target each enforcer still outside. I made sure to clear anything in my way and to push something up to the wall below the window slits so that I could see out of them quickly and easily, then chose the person most isolated from everyone else. The strangling hand would hold him upright, hopefully allowing me to grab two or three other people before anyone realized what was wrong.

I cast the spell three more times in quick succession through three different windows before I heard the cries of alarm go up. I caught one more enforcer as he ran into my line of sight, then rushed to the south-facing window to take out the two that guarded the front entrance. That left three more enforcers.

One of them must have known some magic besides basic combat spells because I heard a woman’s voice yell, “In the tower!” right before two of the remaining three enforcers rushed for the door. The last one tried to flee by jumping over the wall that surrounded the tower grounds. I caught him at the edge of my range and left him passed out right up against the stone.

There was no more time for patient murder after that. Without knowing exactly what kind of spell the enforcer had used to find me and without access to more powerful enchantments that could hide me from a multitude of sensors, I couldn’t afford to assume that I would be able to ambush the remaining enforcers.

Boots thumped up the stairs as both enforcers dashed into the barracks. Without hesitation, the woman charged at the room I had hidden in. Her own force spell led the way, blasting apart the furniture I’d dragged around to use as cover but running out of energy before it could reach me. Behind her, the second enforcer began casting his own spell.

Force bolt took much less time to cast than strangling hand. I made two of them in the blink of an eye and fired them into the faces of the enforcers. Blood splashed through the air, but neither was close enough for it to reach me. My victory secured, I stopped only long enough to drain their storage crystals, as well as the ones belonging to the two door guards that I could access just by poking my head outside, before heading downstairs.

It was time for the tricky part.