Querit stared at me in horror for a long moment before his golem core started processing information again. “But, if he’s hitting you with all the distractions now, that must mean that he’s almost done.”

“Probably,” I agreed.

“What do we do?”

“I’d suggest you flee somewhere less likely to be annihilated by a beam of destructive energy coming down on us from the moon. If you want to be useful, maybe track down these zombie invasions and put a stop to a few of them.”

“What will you be doing? I know you too well to believe you’ve given up.”

“Trying to figure out which site Ammun’s got operational so I can attack it,” I said.

“What if Ammun’s there?”

“Then it’s a toss-up whether he can beat me so far away from the tower. That’s assuming he doesn’t have his elites there, which he probably does. There’s no other reason I can think of that they’re not taking care of his other business.”

My guess was the reason his divining room was empty was for the same reason. Establishing a connection to a moon probably required a lot of diviners working in tandem. The ritual for that couldn’t be a simple thing. From my perspective, that was a good thing. It meant there’d be plenty of opportunities to screw things up.

I dove back into Querit’s mirror to check the rest of the room over. With even a little bit of luck, there’d be something to point me to the ritual site. Querit, meanwhile, opened a cabinet and pulled out another mirror to scry the island. That was surprising. I’d expected him to run for safety even if he wanted to help. It was far more practical to scry from somewhere not likely to be destroyed sometime today.

Five minutes later, he announced, “I found a village under attack.”

“How are they doing at defending themselves?” I asked without looking up.

“Against the zombies? Fine. Against the mages controlling them? Not very well. The undead are being used as walking shields to soak spells and keep anyone fighting without conjurations from getting near the back line while Ammun’s mages bombard the village. It’s strange, though. They could have burned the place to the ground easily. It’s like they’re deliberately taking their time.”

“They are,” I said. “Like I said, it’s a distraction. They’re trying to get me to show up and stop them. Then they throw a bunch of zombies at me, maybe a few specially prepared traps, and they hightail it back through the portals while I deal with everything they left behind.”

“And if we don’t spring the trap, then eventually the town is overwhelmed and everyone dies.”

“Yep.”

“What are you going to do?” the golem asked.

“Keep looking for the ritual site.”

“But your people—”

“They’re not my people. I have watchers among my people who have the tools to contact me. If you’re that worried about them, take a combat frame and go break the siege on their town.”

“I… I think I will.”

I pulled a teleportation platform out of my phantom space and dropped it in the middle of Querit’s lab. It was one of the ones I’d designed to feed off ambient mana a few years ago when I’d been exploring Ammun’s tower and needed easier access to various floors. Unlike the permanent fixtures I’d spread all over the island, this one was primed and ready to go already. If I could have found a way to bring them with me when I teleported, I’d use them all the time. Alas, that was impossible.

“I’ll adjust the wards to let you in and out. If you’re going to handle this feint, you’re going to need to be able to move quickly between disasters and recharge your mana,” I said.

Why he cared was beyond me. They weren’t his people. He’d never even met them. Hell, he wasn’t even human himself. In the end, what was probably the real reason was that his creator had designed him to care, so he did.

“Thank you,” he said simply before injecting some mana into one of his new combat frames, one designed for fighting mages. I’d been a bit wary upon seeing him complete that one, but it was hard to argue the need for it when I’d considered what we were up against. Watching him shift down in size so that he could nestle himself into the harness inside the frame was somewhat disconcerting, but it only took thirty seconds.

Then the frame closed itself up and Querit piloted it to the platform. “I’ll be back soon,” he told me in a hollow voice, speaking through the magic in his frame instead of with his mouth.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Good luck,” I said. He nodded back, then teleported out to fight. Part of me was tempted to keep his mirror going so that I could watch his fight, but my own task was too important to split my attention.

My circuit of the outer wall completed, I moved on to examining the glass pillars. Those were, unfortunately, more complicated to access. I could barely activate them with the amount of mana I could send through the connection, and for the first time, I seriously considered modifying the connection to form a teleportation bridge, a sort of miniature portal.

That would leave my demesne vulnerable, and if I crossed over, I risked a fight with Ammun in his own tower. Now that he’d had years to regain his strength, there was no way I was beating him there. There was a good chance he wasn’t there, however. Wherever this project was happening, he was likely overseeing it personally. If I could actually find that site, I’d know for sure.

Perhaps it would be better to stop my attempts at hijacking the divination room and turn to my own scrying mirror instead. I’d placed beacons all over and could chain a connection to the facilities I’d attacked. Maybe there was something obvious to indicate which one Ammun had restored.

Or maybe there was an entirely new site nowhere near any of the old ones. If that was the case, then exploiting this sympathetic scrying connection was the only chance I had of finding it before Ammun turned the petrified valley into a smoking crater.

I managed to get the first pillar working – just barely. Manipulating something that complicated with tendrils of mana from thousands of miles away was roughly akin to trying to paint a masterpiece while holding the brush with two forks wielded in either hand as a pair of rough tongs. It was possible, but it would have been a lot easier to do it the proper way.

Frustratingly, the pillar didn’t show anything interesting. Instead of the countryside, it gave me a view of one of the floors inside the tower. I didn’t recognize it, but that didn’t mean much. I’d spent most of my time in the sublevels investigating the tower’s foundation, not socializing with the people living there. They all had much paler skin and lighter hair than me, anyway. I’d stuck out in the crowd, and considering how xenophobic they were, I would have drawn a lot of attention from the wrong people if I’d attempted to mingle.

The pillar rapidly cycled through different floors, but never left the tower and didn’t reveal anything I wanted to know. I let it die and adjusted my focus to the next one, then the one after that when it, too, proved to be a dud.

Querit reappeared twenty minutes later, his frame stained with blood and other, more disgusting fluids. “Do you not know any cleaning spells?” I asked. Before he could answer, I added, “That was a rhetorical question. I know that you do.”

“I’m a bit busy, and I’ll just be getting dirty again. No need to waste the time or mana,” he explained.

While he went back to his mirror, I shifted my focus to a new pillar. They weren’t all focused exclusively on the tower, but none of them were showing me what I needed, and I was starting to feel like I was running out of time. I could flee my demesne, but I’d leave a huge amount of my power behind if I did. I’d be safe from Ammun’s opening strike, but it would be much more likely that he’d destroy the valley since it would take me ten times longer to finish searching everything.

Stubbornly, I started checking the next pillar. Querit located a new target and disappeared again, leaving me alone. That cycle repeated two more times, with him growing even filthier each time and me getting more and more frustrated by my lack of progress.

Then I heard the voice I’d been dreading. ‘Gravin. Something is going on. Strangers have appeared outside of town, at least a hundred of them.’

Cursing, I pushed back the chair and stood up. The mirror connecting me to Ammun’s tower went blank for a moment, then returned to its normal reflective surface. ‘I’m on my way,’ I sent back to my father.

At least there was a teleportation platform right here, a little low on mana from Querit using it a few minutes ago, but I could fix that. It took twenty seconds to activate it. Then everything went black and I appeared at my chosen destination: an empty patch of sky above New Alkerist.

A simple invocation sharpened my sight enough to survey the fields and empty desert beyond them. There, half a mile to the west, was an open portal with a steady stream of zombies trudging through it. There were probably five hundred zombies already here, along with thirty or so mages corralling them as they built up numbers to start their assault.

It took me ten seconds of flight to reach the portal, where I hovered overhead, invisible, and cast a master-tier spell that turned the desert into a wild, raging sea of sand. Huge waves swept across the portal, hurling tons of the stuff through the open doorway before burying it completely. With their retreat cut off, the mages here could do nothing but fight and die.

I killed methodically with bolts of lightning that arced down from a clear blue sky to strike them one after another. There was no hiding from my magic, no delaying it. These mages were weak, barely even stage two, and in no way prepared for me. Ammun had sent them here to die, sacrificing them to buy a little bit of time.

I wondered why he’d thought this would work. Other than my family, I wouldn’t go out of my way to save anyone else, and since I’d never mentioned that they so much as existed to Querit, I couldn’t have let their existence slip to Ammun’s watchers. Probably, his agents had questioned people and found out that way, but with the teleportation network destroyed, they’d had no choice but to guess which town to attack.

If that was the plan, then he was once again wasting an enormous amount of resources to simultaneously attack dozens of locations on the off chance that he found the right one. Then again, I was out here stopping his plan from working instead of interfering with his ritual site, which I had yet to even find.

Destroying the zombies was easy once their handlers were all dead. I made quick work of them, left the corpses smoldering out in the sands, and teleported back to the valley to resume my frantic search. Hopefully the failure of that attack wouldn’t prompt Ammun’s commanders to throw more forces at New Alkerist now that they’d provoked a response. Querit was wiping them out all over the island; there was no reason to assume that that particular town was any more important than the others.

But still, the best way to end this was to find Ammun’s project and smash it to pieces. That would buy me the time I needed to exploit the mana resonance point to achieve stage seven. With that, I might just have a chance of standing up to the lich.

I reestablished the connection, confirmed there was still no one home, and resumed my search.