“A sympathetic scrying connection?” I asked.

There was no way Ammun would make that kind of mistake. But then, maybe it wasn’t his mistake. As far as I was aware, today had been the closest Querit and the lich had ever gotten to each other, but it wasn’t the first time Querit had encountered any of his minions.

“The fight outside the tower,” I said before Querit could answer. “One of them must have tagged you with the enchantment.”

“Not me. My combat frame. And I haven’t used it again since then, so I never noticed.”

That was a disturbingly plausible theory, but there was one hole in it. “We would have noticed active scrying,” I said.

“Not if they did the same thing on their end that I just did on mine. Look.”

Querit pointed to the combat frame in the corner of the room. It looked like nothing so much as a slightly oversized suit of armor on its stand, but when I examined the enchantments on it, I saw what he was saying. Hidden in everything that was supposed to be there was the scrying connection, designed as an open two-way channel, commonly used in paired scrying mirrors.

Usually, there were other enchantments woven in to help close those connections when they weren’t wanted, either to conserve mana or for the sake of privacy. In this case, only the simplest part was present. There was, however, a second enchantment woven around it like a cage, one that reversed any scrying coming through the enchantment.

“Clever, but they’ll realize what you did immediately.”

“They will, but no one’s using the link right now, which is why I’ve been using it to gather information on them for the last few hours.”

“Their own reversal enchantment would stop that,” I said.

“Unless you scry through a device like this,” Querit told me. He gestured to the mirror he was using, one he’d created himself and that I’d never seen before. “They got too clever for their own good trying to make their magic work.”

Querit was right about all of it. Somehow, we’d gained a window into Ammun’s operations past any and all of his defensive measures. I took a moment to analyze the enchantments and ensure they weren’t harmful or trapped in any way, then peered into the mirror. It revealed an enormous circular room with mirrored walls. At least fifty glass pillars were scattered across the floor, all of them stretching to the ceiling and five feet wide.

Upon closer inspection, I realized that they were all filled with liquid mana. That was an extremely expensive and wasteful setup, but I supposed Ammun had the mana to waste. The liquid mana would drain as the scrying pillars were used, requiring more to be constantly pumped in. On the other hand, it was possible to scry significantly farther this way.

The sympathetic scrying link wasn’t on one of the pillars, but at a station on the wall. It was one of the many mirrored panels, but covered in etched runes to shield our side from peering back across the connection. Querit’s mirror neatly countered the effect.

“You’ve seen this before,” I remarked. There was no way he’d spun the enchantment up from nothing and gotten lucky on the first try. That was like taking a blank key and filing it in random places in the hopes that it would fit the lock.

“I’ve read the theories. They’re in one of the books we took from Professor Velder’s room.” He cast a glance over at his bookshelf, then grabbed one with telekinesis and pulled it over to us. “Chapter twenty-one, I believe.”

“I’ll review it later,” I told him. “Has the room been this empty the whole time?”

“There were about twenty mages in there earlier, but they all left an hour ago. Judging on where they were scrying, I believe it’s the middle of the night there.”

I shook my head. “Ammun doesn’t sleep, and I don’t believe he’d leave a place like this unmanned just because us mere humans still need to. There should be shifts of diviners working here.”

In fact, I knew that because I’d seen it in Laphlin’s memories when I’d captured him. The diviners never left the room completely unstaffed. Something had to be going on, and what better place to find out than the center of information in Ammun’s tower?

“Move over,” I said. “I’m going to do some digging.”

Querit gave me a questioning look, which I ignored, and stepped to the side. I took a few seconds to familiarize myself with the enchantments to make sure I wasn’t going to break them, then got to work.

The first step was to convert the scrying connection into something I could send mana through. That wasn’t hard to do in a very limited capacity, but I needed more finesse if I was going to work the enchantments on the other side of the mirror. “This is going to be expensive,” I muttered as I started adding another layer of spells to the mirror.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

After ten minutes of work, I was ready to proceed. Tendrils of mana stretched out through the glass and invaded Ammun’s scrying room. I connected them to the nearest station and cast a spell to show whatever the mirror had last scried. An unremarkable stretch of countryside appeared in the wall, somewhere west of the tower.

I quickly moved around the room, mostly discovering more of the same, though I did occasionally get a glimpse at a town stuffed with former tower-dwelling mages. There were no signs of the prior occupants, likely all slain or fled by now. I couldn’t imagine a scenario where Ammun’s forces took prisoners.

There had to be something worth seeing here. These people were the ones feeding him information about everything going on in his empire. Was it really nothing but looking at random stretches of fields and forests?

On the far side of the room, I finally found something. The image faded into the mirror as I pushed mana into it, and a large bluff just outside the tower appeared. Unlike the majority of places Ammun’s diviners were watching, this one was fully occupied. There had to be thousands of men and women there.

Almost all of them were dead.

“Ancestors forbid! What is this?” Querit gasped.

“He’s a lich. What do you think?”

“Necromancy, but… on this scale? It’s an abomination. Where did he even get so many bodies?”

“I guess now we know why Ammun sent mages out to attack all those towns. It wasn’t about reclaiming Ralvost. It was to gather materials for a zombie horde. The better question is, ‘What is he planning on doing with them?’ And judging by those archways I see at the far end, I think the answer is ‘flooding somewhere via portal.’”

“Here?” Querit asked. “What would be the point? The wards and defense systems would tear them apart.”

“Exactly why it won’t be here.”

The archways had portals glowing in them, fourteen in total. Zombies shuffled through them at the command of living mages, loosely organized into squads of twenty for each handler. Their progress wasn’t swift—zombies weren’t the nimblest variety of undead—but it was steady. It would probably take hours to finish emptying the bluff, but they wouldn’t be taking breaks.

“It’s a distraction,” I muttered. “A fire for me to focus on putting out while Ammun makes his move somewhere else. That’s what the attack on the valley was, too. He’s giving me problems to keep me busy. Pretty soon we’re going to start hearing about zombies attacking villages.”

But what was Ammun’s true objective? It had to be something big if all his elites were there helping him. He hadn’t even bothered to put anyone truly powerful in charge of the attack on my demesne. “We broke the machines, though. Were they just another distraction? Or did he get them fixed?”

Maybe he didn’t need all eight of them. If he threw all his resources into fixing just one, it might be online now. If that was the case, though, then obviously we’d been wrong about what the machine actually did. It couldn’t be an expansion of Ammun’s radius if he didn’t need the whole ring. If not that, then what?

“Did you ever figure out anything about those hidden sites we attacked?” I asked.

“I did jot down the schematics of anything I saw,” Querit said. “Nothing substantial, just a lot of partial designs.”

“Let me see them.”

A few seconds later, I had thirty loose pages floating in the air in front of me while I scoured them for clues. So many of the rune structures were generic enough that they could have been used in dozens of different constructions, and with huge portions of the overall design missing, it was impossible to put them together.

There were still some I didn’t recognize, though. Maybe there’d be a hint in there. “This one,” I said, shifting a page to Querit. “Have you ever seen anything that uses this design?”

“No,” he said immediately. “It has a similar composition to an ultra-long-range scrying design developed about sixty years prior to the breaking of the world, but this section here doesn’t match.”

I studied the rune structure again as I mentally tried to fit in the missing pieces. Now that Querit pointed out what the small cluster of runes might be used for, I could see how it would work with a few modifications. If it was being used for communication, it wouldn’t work as it stood—not on its own—but there was plenty of room for additional components outside the piece Querit had copied.

“This would only go one way,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense. There would have to be additional runes between these two sections if the return communication was a separate structure.”

Even the idea that it was a communication device was a stretch, if I was being honest. I was just trying to build off Querit’s initial idea, and besides, he was right. It was complete overkill. There was no reason to power a communication spell this way, not when there were so many simpler and more efficient ways to speak with someone, even on the other side of the planet.

Unless...

My blood ran cold.

"What is it?" Querit asked.

"Who developed the ultra-long-range scrying design?”

“A small independent research team based in Khashir, I believe.”

“Where’s Khashir located? I mean, back when it existed.”

“The kingdom was called Nephar, but it fell apart well before the world broke. Khashir remained independent as far as I’m aware, though I should add that world politics was not my purview of study.”

“How about world history?” I asked. “Do you know anything about the group that enslaved a moon core?”

“Only what you’ve told me,” Querit said.

“Could they have been the same mages who developed the scrying design? Or connected to them in some way?” I pressed.

“I suppose it’s possible. Why do you… No.”

I nodded and brandished the paper. “This isn’t designed to enable a conversation across the planet. Its purpose is to transmit instructions to a celestial body like a moon.”

“But then, why did Ammun need eight of them?”

“Maybe he didn’t. Or maybe he did, but he changed his plans to focus on just getting one of his machines operational.”

“You think he’s trying to destroy another moon? Why? What would that gain him?”

“No, not destroy. I think he’s trying to repeat what his enemies did to him. He’s trying to take control of a moon to turn it into a weapon. Only this time, without an enemy force in possession of a tower like Ammun’s, there will be nobody to fight back against him. He’ll be able to rain destruction down from the skies without fear of anyone being able to stop him.”

“But we know where the facility is. We can attack it,” Querit argued.

“We know. But who else would? And besides, Ammun’s spent an enormous amount of resources providing us with distractions. Where do you think the first place he’s going to target is?”