“Did they know anything?” Querit asked when I appeared in his workshop.

“Nothing all that useful. Mid-level mages, disposable fodder just strong enough to cooperate with each other. Somehow, Ammun knew about the resonance point project and was keeping tabs on it.”

“Maybe he’s upset about us breaking his toys a few months ago.”

If that was an attempt to deflect suspicion away from himself, it wasn’t a very good one. I’d only known about Ammun’s project because I was personally in Ralvost snooping around. Ammun’s surprise appearance at my demesne aside, there was no way he was roaming the island scrying on me. Had his followers seeded the area with scrying beacons?

It still shouldn’t have worked for the exact same reasons I wasn’t able to scry the tower directly. And there was no mistaking that Ammun had known the precise moment I was going to be most vulnerable far enough ahead of time to move more than a hundred mages into position for a full-frontal assault. Somehow, he knew. I needed to find out how.

Unsurprisingly, the disposable mages he’d sent at me in the vain hopes of killing me while I was weakened hadn’t been privy to the details. Other than prying some information about what kind of military forces Ammun had put together—lots of mages at stage two or three who were willing to commit acts of violence in exchange for keeping their places inside the tower—there hadn’t been much of use in their heads.

When I didn’t reply, Querit changed the topic. “I think we can fix the displaced pillar without too much effort. I’ll start cataloging the destroyed trees, too, but the invaders only got about ten minutes to do some damage, and living stone is resilient. Even with the ones knocked over or broken, I don’t anticipate any statistically significant loss of mana production.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said.

“What?”

“This whole attack. They timed it perfectly. Ammun himself spent an inconceivable amount of mana to show up in person and crack my wards just long enough for a few dozen mages to get inside my demesne. Was that really his whole plan? He didn’t even send in a single elite. What was the point? I would have said it was a cheap probing strike with some disposable soldiers if not for him showing up. Why waste that mana? Why waste the window of vulnerability? What was he trying to accomplish?”

I was sure Ammun would have no complaints if I’d actually died, but it just didn’t feel like that was the goal. Maybe there’d been more to the plan but my defenses had been too robust for him to reach that stage. Or maybe they were trying to sabotage me somehow, destroy some piece of infrastructure or slip something inside my demesne that would come into play later.

Or maybe it had all been an act to let Querit come to my rescue, to give him a threat to face on my behalf. But why? What benefit was there to that over simply killing me? Did Ammun need me alive for some reason? I couldn’t imagine what benefit he might potentially extract from me as a prisoner or a pawn that would outweigh the very real chance of removing me as an obstacle today.

“What’s his game?” I asked. “What are we missing?”

Querit thought about it for a second, then asked, “You knew him back in your previous life, yes? You trained him at one point. What was he like?”

“Arrogant, but fragile,” I said. “He wasn’t nobility, but he was something close to it. His home country had a weird political structure. Ammun had some raw talent and a lot of resources spent on him to nurture it, which gave him an overinflated opinion of his prowess because he never met anyone his own age who could challenge him. He intensely disliked being shown up at anything.

“I had many apprentices, usually with some overlap. One might be at the end of his apprenticeship, while another was just starting, and there could be two or more somewhere in the middle. Some lessons I taught to classes, and Ammun had the misfortune of coming to me about three years after a pair of twins I took in.

“They had a lot of potential, but no formal training. Apprenticing them was an act of curiosity on my part, just to see how much I could nurture them. Ammun came in with a solid foundation, and I ended up lecturing all three of them together regularly. At first, he looked down on them both because they were older than him and because they’d had years as my students, yet he was their equal.

“Then they started to pull ahead of him. That potential, you see. They were both brilliant in different fields. They just needed someone to point them in the right direction and give them the resources they’d lacked. Ammun was… infuriated by what he saw as an unfair situation. He thought I must be cheating somehow, sneaking the twins off for extra lessons. He couldn’t comprehend that they might just be better than him. The idea that I, at the time already a thousand years old, would even care enough to play games just to spite him got so cemented in his head that I had to dismiss him from my care for several years.”

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“He came back?” Querit asked.

I nodded. “His family was highly influential and could make gaining legitimate access to certain rare reagents I wanted impossible. It wasn’t worth an open conflict with them. Ammun came back after a period of tutelage with someone else, somewhat more proficient in spellcraft but with the same character flaws he’d always held. He finished up his apprenticeship with me over the next decade and departed. I think both of us were happy to be rid of the other.”

“And you met him again when he woke back up,” Querit said. “You spoke with him. Was he the same?”

“Nobody lives for a thousand years without changing, and a single conversation isn’t enough to say whether any of the spoiled child I tutored still remained inside that fleshless skull.”

Querit had a good point, though. Could Ammun’s motivation simply be pettiness and spite? Had he avoided sending in what could have been an overwhelming force just to string me along, to force me to confront how weak I was right now? To be killed by a handful of mages barely deserving of the title was humiliating, but I couldn’t imagine anyone operating at our level of power committing such a massive tactical blunder just out of pride and anger.

No, it still didn’t make sense. I was missing something. Regardless of whatever plans Ammun might be working on, it didn’t change the fact that he was somehow spying on my demesne. That was a more immediate problem that needed resolving.

“It might still tell us something,” Querit said. “But I have no idea what.”

“Let me know if you figure it out,” I said. “In the meantime, we need to know everything every one of those mages did while they were inside the barrier, and we need to find every mage who got trapped on the outside so we can hunt them down.”

“You’re not really in any shape to do either of those things.”

“I am aware. My agenda only has two things on it today: fix that pillar, and go to sleep.”

“I’ll help with the first, then take care of the other stuff while you recover,” Querit offered.

I couldn’t see a way Querit could sabotage the pillar system if I was right there working with him, so I agreed to let him help. ‘Help’ turned out to mean he did the majority of the work while I supervised. It wasn’t lost on him that I stuck around to oversee the restoration, but he didn’t mention it. After an hour of work, the pillar was once again perfectly positioned and the network resynced. A quick test revealed everything was working fine.

“One problem solved,” I said. “You’ll handle things for a few hours?”

“I told you I would,” he said simply.

“Good,” I said. Just as I was about to teleport back to my quarters, I hesitated and added, “I’m sorry. It’s not that I want to suspect you, but the stakes are too high for me not to consider every angle.”

“I understand. We are still essentially strangers, and I’m not even human. There could be anything in the rune structures of my core, even…” Querit trailed off, then he leaped into the air and flew away, calling back, “I have to go check something.”

“Dramatic much?” I asked his retreating form, but he was too far away to hear me.

* * *

It was the middle of the night when I woke up. The very first thing I did was consult with my genius loci to sweep the valley. Everything appeared to be as it should be. The pillars were pulling in mana to recharge. The moon core was undamaged. Most of the petrified forest was filling the air with mana. The valley was still shrouded in a mana containment enchantment.

The resonance point hung in the air over the southern bluffs, waiting for me to use it to reforge my core and reach stage seven. If everything had gone according to plan, that would be my first stop. Did I have time now? Would I weaken myself too much in the process to take care of everything else if I tried?

I’d scried New Alkerist before going to sleep and let my family know about the attack. Father had promised to make sure everyone with a transmission stone had it on them at all times so they could immediately report anything even remotely suspicious. Nothing had woken me, so I could only assume the town hadn’t been assaulted.

Just to be safe, I scried it again, and was relieved to see everything quiet and in one piece. Ammun’s forces hadn’t attacked – not yet. I wondered if Querit had made any progress in tracking them down. Thinking of Querit reminded me of his mysterious exit, and I turned my mind to finding him next. That was easy enough; he was standing in his lab, working furiously on something.

Feeling refreshed now, I stood up and took a few minutes to feed and clean myself, then teleported to Querit. He barely even looked up when I appeared before going back to his work. “I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said.

“Bad news first.”

“I’ve tracked down the majority of those mages. They’re all over the island. Eight towns were destroyed while you were sleeping, and a significant number of them are preparing to attack Derro right now.”

So not bad on a personal level, but not great. Any minute now, one of them might appear in New Alkerist, though with the strength those mages possessed, the town’s defenses would keep everyone safe long enough for me to get there.

“Have any new mages appeared on the island?”

“Not that I can tell, but then, they’ve already proven their ability to get here unnoticed. It’s not like we can keep watch over the entire island.”

I nodded. It wasn’t impossible, but the investment of resources to create an island-wide scrying network was far greater than I was willing to commit to. Even if I had the spare mana, the amount of time needed to finish the work was prohibitive.

“I’ll get to hunting the mages we know about in a minute,” I said. “What’s the good news?”

“You were right,” the golem told me. “It’s my fault Ammun was able to spy on you.”

“That’s good news?”

“I found out how he did it. He made a mistake.”

“A mistake that lets him spy on us?” I asked.

“No, a mistake that lets us spy on him.”