Book 2, Chapter 17

Knocking the last enforcer out was easy. Doing so in a way that allowed the prisoners to go free was not. In fact, it was downright impossible. I’d initially assumed he would have the keys to the large shared cell and the individual cells on him, but that turned out to not be the case. I’d thought to just wait for him to get too close to the bars, close enough for someone to grab the keys off him after I used a strangling hand spell on him, but from the looks of it, that wouldn’t have worked anyway. The enforcer knew better than to get within arm’s reach of the bars.

So I had a man who wouldn’t get close enough for any of the prisoners to grab him, smart of him, but annoying to me, and who didn’t have the keys on his person anyway. On the bright side, it meant I didn’t need to wait for him to get into position before I attacked him, but it also meant it was going to be more difficult to get the prisoners free without them seeing me.

There was no hiding that someone had attacked the enforcers tower. I’d left close to two dozen bodies in the tower and on the grounds, a fact that I expected to be noticed soon enough as new enforcers returned with more prisoners. That did mean I couldn’t afford to waste too much time on this, lest I find myself fighting through even those enforcers on my way back out.

The simplest solutions were often the best ones. I could scry for a bit and hope to spot the keys hanging out in the open somewhere. I could wait for the enforcer to get too close and give him a telekinetic shove toward the bars. It was possible that he did have the keys, just hidden away inside his pockets somewhere. Or I could do it the hardest, but simplest way.

With very few exceptions, most spells were either internal, touch-based, or line of sight. Divinations bent the rules on that a bit in that there were plenty of spells that created what was essentially a second set of senses that moved independent of the caster’s physical location. Even for those spells though, the important part was that the origin point was set. Other facets of the spell, things like range or damage, might have gradients that could be altered with more mana or by channeling the spells through a wand or stave, but taking a spell that worked on something requiring physical contact and projecting it remotely was extraordinarily difficult to do, even for novice or basic tier spells.

I doubted there was a single person in that cell who appreciated quite how hard it was to use a simple unlocking spell on that door while sitting on the stairs, out of sight, relying on a scrying divination to show me my target. Projecting that touch-based spell fifty feet into a room I couldn’t even see was one of the more difficult feats of magic I’d pulled off since my reincarnation. It took a great deal more effort than maintaining an invisibility spell while I ran to the lock would have, but that would have been twenty or thirty times more expensive.

The lock clicked loudly as it turned, causing everyone to freeze and look at the door. The enforcer frowned as he set down the cloth he’d been using to clean some blood off one of the various knives laid out on a tray and snatched up his baton. “Alright, which one of you was messing with the do-huark!”

Strangling hand took hold mid-sentence. The enforcer’s hand came up to grab at his throat, but there was nowhere to get a finger between his skin and the band of force pressing down on it, not without digging through his own flesh. I didn’t give him much time to do that either. In less than ten seconds, he was unconscious.

I was already walking back up the stairs when one of the prisoners pushed on the cell door. It swung open with a creak I could hear even on the floor above, cuing me to pick up the pace. I splurged a bit of mana on life sense to make sure I could track where people were, something I would normally reserve for a combat situation when I needed accuracy to fight. It was not strictly necessary here, but it helped me keep track of Tanner in the chaos that was the sub-basement.

I made it back outside the tower and fled to a hiding spot where I could observe the freed prisoners’ escape. They started coming out in groups of two or three, hesitant to poke their heads out the door for fear of sudden death falling on them like a bolt of lightning from the skies. I could see it in the way they moved. The enforcers were all dead somehow, just bodies without a mark on them lying scattered across the grounds. The lock had turned on its own, obviously magic.

They probably thought they were caught up in some sort of game between competing nobles, or mages, or noble mages. I’d seen that happen a time or two myself, and it inevitably led to a lot of innocent people being killed. Those first people who rushed out were brave, desperate, or just plain stupid. They had no idea what was going on or whether they’d be struck down in their attempt to escape the enforcers who’d captured them.

Tanner was in that group, of course.

I plotted out his course from my high vantage point and picked a spot about four blocks ahead of him, but only two away from me. He wasn’t making a lot of effort to be subtle, and I needed to stop him before he drew the wrong sort of attention and got caught all over again. I dropped life sense once he was out of the tower and separate from the others. It was easy enough to track him through just his mana alone out on the streets.

I reached the empty building about twenty seconds before he did, mostly by going across roofs and empty yards to stay off the streets. The back wall of the house had collapsed ages ago, allowing easy access inside. A bit of weight reduction magic to allow me to vault over the rubble got me there fast enough to get into position with seconds to spare.

My hand shot out to grab Tanner’s arm as he ran by. He was twice my age and close to a foot taller than me, but with a strength invocation powering my limbs, I managed to drag him off his feet and into the house. He let out a startled, “Oomph!” as I stopped him and pulled him backward, but had enough sense not to shout or draw attention to himself.

“Hi, Tanner,” I said.

“Holy crap!” he yelped. “Where did you come from?!”

“Keep it down, please. Let’s keep walking, but a little less suspicious, alright?”

“To hell with that. Enforcers are all over the neighborhood. It’s like a swarm of sand mantises has invaded. We need to get far away from here until they calm down.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “And we should do it without attracting suspicion, which running down the street does.”

“You don’t understand. There was some freaky stuff happening back at their watch tower by the east gates. Bad things are going down and we need to not be in the east side of the city when it does. You can stay if you want, but I’m getting out of here.”

“Tanner. I need you to listen to me. We’re going to leave the east district together, and we’re going to do it slowly and without drawing any attention to ourselves. Once we’re safe, we’re going to talk about what comes next. Either you become a mage today, or you wait until you’ve practiced the basics enough to do a better job at it, but regardless of your choice, I want you to take me to the smuggler’s tunnel.”

“That wasn’t the deal,” Tanner said.

“I know, but there’s a real possibility you’re going to get yourself killed before you can live up to your end of the bargain,” I told him. “Having to save you wasn’t part of the deal either, but here we are. So, time to pay up.”

“That… that was you?” he asked.

I rolled my eyes and said, “Come on. This tunnel is in the south side of town, right? Whose territory was it again?”

“Hyago, in the South Wall District,” Tanner said, his voice subdued.

“Great, let’s go then.”

Together, we walked at a normal pace, though we avoided the main roads. Instead, we took side streets and alleyways, and sometimes trespassed through houses, empty or not. Tanner proved to be a remarkably good guide once I got him back on track. I just had to keep him from jumping at every shadow and sharp noise, something I would not have expected from a kid who grew up on the streets.

Maybe he’d only recently been orphaned and lost his home. That might explain a few things. I decided that I didn’t care right now, not when I had so much else going on.

* * *

“Did you really kill all those enforcers?” Tanner asked suddenly, coming to a halt about an hour after we’d started walking. We were crouched under a partially collapsed building, one that had been big enough to take up a whole block when it was standing. Now it was a rat’s warren of tunnels that looked dangerously unstable, which was probably why most people avoided it.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t want them coming after you once you’d escaped.”

“You killed them to help me?”

“Keep moving,” I said, ignoring the question. “The faster we’re through here, the better.”

We didn’t need to risk our lives crawling through this partially collapsed building, but it was the only way to get into the South Wall District without going through an enforcer checkpoint. News of the raid on one of their headquarters had spread faster than I’d thought it would and the city was now crawling with them.

I’d probably caused more problems for the people of Derro than I’d solved by attacking that one base, but I didn’t have the time or the energy to go around killing every enforcer in the city. I had to wonder what the enforcers were even looking for, considering I’d left no witnesses alive behind me. My best guess was they were just grabbing anyone with a lot of mana, which probably meant anyone with a reasonable amount of money on them. Presumably they’d be letting the people who turned out to just be rich and not rogue mages go.

“It’s kind of tight here, but just stay low and you can squeeze through,” Tanner said as we came to a spot where one wall had toppled into another, creating a sort of triangle of open space between them. “You didn’t answer.”

“I killed them because I needed you,” I said. “We have an agreement and you can’t fulfill your half locked up in a cell.”

“They’d have let us all go in a day or two.”

“Maybe, but I have no way of knowing that. I wasn’t willing to take the risk.”

Tanner stopped and twisted in place to give me an incredulous look. “But you didn’t have a problem attacking an enforcer tower? How is that less risky?”

“Because I knew I’d win. Those guys barely counted as adepts.”

A minute later, we were able to stand back up. My hands and knees were covered in dirt, a problem for later. I suspected it would be a waste of mana to clean myself up now. Sure enough, Tanner went over to a pile of rubble that led into a sinkhole and said, “This will take us to the middle of South Wall, and then it’s just a few minutes to the smuggler’s tunnel.”

We climbed down and I took a quick look around. It looked like some sort of sewage tunnel to me, albeit one that was bone dry and likely hadn’t been used since before the city’s collapse. There were probably hundreds of tunnels just like this one, broken and isolated from the system in whatever event that had destroyed the city.

It was perfect for getting under the inner wall unseen.