Book 2, Chapter 15

I was not particularly surprised to find the street kids’ home abandoned. They’d left all their possessions behind, presumably because they planned to return later, but with the enforcers out in number, the best way to keep their home from being discovered was not to be there. I didn’t know how much a bunch of homeless orphans knew about a mage’s ability to sense mana, but I could see it being common knowledge that enforcers could just magically find people.

It did create a problem for me, though. I had no idea where Tanner was and only limited ways of finding him. The most obvious and least efficient method was to simply scry the city until I happened upon him. It could theoretically work, but I had no way to tell how long it would take or how much of my mana it would consume.

Were I in my old body and working with practically unlimited mana, I might have cast a master level divination that allowed me to peer backwards in time. The amount of mana it would take to look back even an hour was far, far more than my maximum, even with my mana crystal included and the slight streamlining of my efficiency thanks to my staff. I would be lucky to get a reading from five minutes ago if I used all my current reserves. There were other verions I could use to narrow it down that had cheaper costs and longer range at the expense of accuracy and clarity, but they were still going to be expensive to use.

Blind luck and brute force were out, which left me with one option: being clever. The best kinds of cleverness were the ones I’d set up before I needed them, and unfortunately for me, I just didn’t have such an abundance of mana that I could afford to waste it heading off theoretical problems that might never come to be. Otherwise I would have tagged the boy with a tracer yesterday. I’d even thought about doing it anyway it simply because I’d considered the possibility of him running off. I hadn’t though. It didn’t seem worth it since he hadn’t technically gotten what he wanted from me yet.

I regretted that decision now. It would have been so much easier to find him if I’d bet a bit of mana on this eventuality. Instead, I had one child out of over twenty that had likely scattered in every direction, and the easiest way to find the one I needed was to wait for them all to show back up in a day or two after the enforcers moved on. That assumed he didn’t get caught, which, considering I’d already rescued him from an enforcer yesterday, wasn’t a given.

I could trace the enforcers to see if one of them would find Tanner. They weren’t trying to hide, so it wouldn’t be hard to tag them, though it would take a little bit more mana to make sure the tracer was hidden from their senses. That and there were probably thirty of them, so I’d be repeating the spell over and over again.

The most economical option I could come up with that might be viable was to take something Tanner owned and use that as part of a linking spell that would connect it to its owner. There was just one small problem with that. I had no idea which of these nests of cloth scraps was Tanner’s. For all I knew, the kids shared them or just slept in whichever one was unoccupied when they decided to go to bed.

Other than that, there wasn’t really much in their home, certainly not anything remotely resembling a personal possession. It was hard to use an object reading spell to trace its owner if I didn’t have the object to serve as a focus. That was a setback, but not one I couldn’t overcome since I happened to have something Tanner had kept in his possession for several days.

Money was, admittedly, a very poor link. It would be difficult to sort out him from all the previous owners, but I could do it. Of more concern was that the shard he’d stolen was back in my hideout. There were plenty of enforcers roaming the area that I’d need to dodge, again, to go retrieve it.

They weren’t hard to avoid, but it was annoying. I would walk a block, duck behind a wall or into a house to wait for the mana I sensed coming in my direction to pass by, then resume. Three different times, I had to change direction entirely when enforcers would cluster together at intersections to update each other on their progress and coordinate their next moves.

My big advantage was that they seemed to be relying on the same thing I was to navigate: the ability to sense mana. Rather than being thorough with their sweeps, they would just stroll up and down the streets. Against a normal person, this would have been fine. Anyone hiding inside a house would have been detected, and I was almost positive that I caught an enforcer looting one house of a few tenners and halfshards that were stashed inside.

Their strategy failed against anyone who could properly shield their mana cores, and of course my enchanted gear was equally well hidden. I still had to move carefully, so much so that it took me five times longer to get back to my hideout than it should have, but I made it there without a single enforcer spotting me.

The pile of leech stones I’d snagged after that pick pocket had dumped them—not an uncommon occurrence, I’d learned over the last few days—was still sitting in the corner. Most of them had a slight glow to them, the sign of the mana they’d stolen while riding in my phantom space. One shard was completely dull, thanks to Tanner’s practice session.

I plucked it out of the pile and worked an object reading spell on it. As expected, the shard had changed hands dozens of times in the last few months, culminating with Tanner stealing it from a merchant while his friend provided a distraction before finally being added to my own collection of leech stones. I pushed out the other owners to focus on my wayward student.

It was hard, not in the least because money was a terrible focus for this spell. It had a transient nature, meant to be passed from one hand to the next, that muddied the results. Worse still, Tanner himself wasn’t used to having possessions and apparently hadn’t much thought of the shard as his so much as it was something he was temporarily holding onto. He’d probably expected that I wanted it as payment for my services, not that I was interested in the mana itself.

Hard wasn’t impossible, however, and though it took me a few seconds, I was able to block out everyone else in a long line of ownership to focus on just Tanner. Visions of his activities over the day and a half he’d had the shard on him tried to crowd into my brain, but I wasn’t interested in those. The true purpose of the object reading was to combine it with a scry trace spell so that I could link it to its owner. The connection was tenuous, but for all my new concerns about my failing mind, I was more than skilled enough to manage the two spells.

The scry trace took hold using the essence of Tanner pulled from the object reading spell, and I got an immediate sense that he was somewhere off to my right. I frowned and took a second to orient myself. I was facing east. Was he outside the city?

If I’d used a tracer directly on Tanner, I’d get more than a vague sense of what direction he was in, but using it this way as a work around limited the spell’s effectiveness. It also burned up all of Tanner’s history inside the shard, so I wouldn’t be able to do it again. That gave me a very limited window of a few hours to hunt the boy down before the trace broke.

Hopefully the enforcer presence would be thinner over where Tanner was at. I didn’t have time to keep dodging around them. I climbed back onto the roof of my hideout, waited for an enforcer standing at the intersection two blocks away to move, and set off toward where the spell told me Tanner was.

* * *

There was a tower near the edge of the city, four stories high and made of stone. It had obviously been repaired many times, its walls a collage of mismatched stone. Despite that, it was in good shape. The enforcers apparently used it as some sort of headquarters, judging by how many were there. I counted four of them standing guard outside the front door with another six roaming the grounds around the tower. Whatever buildings might have previously existed there had been cleared away, leaving a solid hundred feet of open ground.

When I’d first scried out the city, I’d mistaken this as some sort of garrison for the gate guards. It was only later that I’d realized there were no guards, and by then, I’d put the tower out of my mind. It was far too small to house the kind of people needed to effectively patrol an entire section of the city, which was why I’d dismissed it as a possible enforcer location when they were so much more heavily concentrated near the center of the city.

Every floor had multiple windows, slitted to allow archers to fire out while providing them with cover from return fire. Its doors were also made of stone, a pair of heavy things with a drop bar on the back side that would take two grown men to lift. It was probably the most secure place I’d seen yet since being reborn.

And in the middle of that, in some sort of basement holding room, unless I missed my guess, was Tanner. He wasn’t the only one there either, unless they were holding him in the middle of a rather anemic treasury. By my count, there were thirty or forty people with varying levels of mana below the enforcer tower and another ten inside the tower itself. Those last ten all had significantly more mana than the group I’d mentally tagged as the prisoners.

That made twenty enforcers to guard their stronghold and a few dozen prisoners, of which Tanner was one of them. At this point I had to stop and consider whether he was worth the effort to save. I’d invested time, effort, and mana into him already, but he’d gone and gotten himself caught.

To be fair, the enforcers’ sweeping of the city was probably my fault. I’d killed one of them and hadn’t done a very good job hiding the body. If I’d let him live, it would just be a group after Tanner specifically. Regardless of whether they’d found the corpse, it was likely that they were pulling people in for questioning relating to their missing comrade. One could easily make the argument that none of this would have happened if I hadn’t killed the man. One could also make the argument that I wouldn’t have had to kill him if he hadn’t attacked Tanner in the first place.

Did that make it my responsibility to save Tanner or any of the other captives? I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t even a particularly good person. My reasons for being here were wholly selfish. I wanted access to that smuggler’s tunnel under the wall, but chances were Tanner wasn’t the only one who knew about it. I could probably find someone else who could help me.

While I watched from my perch on a house three blocks away, a pair of enforcers marched down the street, each with a child’s wrist firmly clasped in their free hand. I recognized one of them as one of the little girls from the street kids’ crew. She couldn’t have been any older than me. The other was twelve or thirteen, too old for the crew. Perhaps he worked for that Blue Rat guy.

The enforcers weren’t making any allowances for the kids, and the girl was struggling to keep up with their pace. She practically ran, but repeatedly stumbled and was dragged forward several steps until she could get her feet under her again. Even from a few streets away, I could see that she was crying.

My mouth firmed into a hard line as I watched the children being handled. I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t going to leap to her rescue and challenge the enforcer to a duel. That would be stupid and, frankly, suicidal when all the other enforcers jumped me at the same time.

That having been said, I mentally marked the man who was dragging the little girl along. He wasn’t going to live to see the moons rise tonight.