One of the hardest parts of being a diviner was having to have an excellent memory. There was only so much magic could do to help that along, too. At some point, how well a mage could process and remember information separated the hobbyists from the professionals. Ammun’s diviners were, presumably, all professionals.

I was about to put that to the test with Ashinder. Querit had been grilling him heavily, and I was very curious to see if his information would match up with what the other diviners had told me. Part of me regretted that I couldn’t talk to all of them, but the truth was that I had a limited amount of time remaining, and I’d rather spend it advancing my core to stage seven than interviewing a bunch of people for the same information to see who was lying or misremembering.

I teleported myself into Querit’s workshop, where the golem was busy putting together an illusory map of what I assumed was the summit. It was impressively big, especially for an artificial mountain. There were no less than eight floors, each one with dozens of rooms, all nestled behind a thousand feet of solid, spell-reinforced rock. There were permanent portals leading in, but the other sides were all in the tower, which was inarguably even more well defended than the summit.

The odds of me getting lucky with another sympathetic connection I could use to bypass the wards were next to nonexistent. The only reason it had happened the first time was because Querit had tangled with somebody with enough skill to put the enchantment on his combat frame, but without enough skill to use a better alternative. Ammun’s only options had been to leave the vulnerability to spy on me, or lose the ability to see what I was up to.

He really should have put the other end of that room somewhere else besides his diviner corps main operations room. His mistake – it was a pile of shattered glass now, and I was several thousand gallons of liquid mana richer.

“This hallway is wider,” Ashinder was saying as I appeared nearby. “And I think there are some wards on the door at the end. We had to be escorted past it every time.”

The image stretched out a bit at the diviner’s direction. He nodded in satisfaction, then froze when he saw me standing there. “Uh… Hello.”

“Hi,” I said dryly. Ashinder didn’t quite flinch at the sound of my voice, but it was clear that he was holding himself steady. This was far from the first time I’d seen a mage struggle to control his fear when I showed up, though admittedly it hadn’t happened all that much since my reincarnation. This particular mage, however, had watched me slaughter the better part of a hundred people at his direction. I imagined he had some baggage to deal with after that.

“What are the defenses like on this?” I asked.

“No physical access,” Querit said. “We could probably bore through it if we had a week and Ammun left us alone, but neither of those is likely to happen.”

“Ward set up?”

“Identical to his tower, from what I understand.”

“So we’re not going to be phasing through it,” I said. “This site must be incredibly important to him if he’s investing this much into it.”

I asked a few more questions about the defenses, all of which confirmed the information I’d gotten from Nakra and Oslea. It seemed Ammun hadn’t treated his diviners very well, which was generally bad practice since there was no one else more likely to start digging for secrets better left alone. Pissing off an entire platoon of diviners was beyond stupid, but I supposed Ammun hadn’t been too worried about betrayal when he thought they had nowhere to go and he had an entire army of mages to help keep them in line.

“Can we get some eyes inside?” I finally asked.

Ashinder hesitated. “Maybe? We couldn’t scry half of the summit even when we were inside it, but I might still be keyed into the wards?”

“Let’s find out,” I said. I pulled all three of us from Querit’s workshop to my personal scrying chamber.

Unlike the portable mirror I usually used, this room was set up similar to what Ammun had furnished his diviners with – yet one more design he’d copied from me. The walls were all mirrored panels five feet wide and stretching from floor to ceiling. Each one was trimmed with a border of runes, optimized for different situations. One worked better for long-distance scrying, another excelled at communication between multiple discrete points, and a third was designed to pierce wards.

It was to that one that I led Ashinder. “I’ll handle the distance. You focus on getting through the wards.”

“What do you want me doing?” Querit asked.

I thought for a moment. “Have those zombie strike teams stopped coming yet?”

“Slowing down. I managed to collapse another portal, and that seems to have them hesitating. I know they’ve still got a thousand zombies in reserve, probably more.”

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“Stay here for a bit. I might need your help with that other thing we were talking about.”

Querit nodded and settled back into place. I noticed he hadn’t left his combat frame and found that the thought of that didn’t really bother me. Perhaps I was coming to trust the golem after all. I was running out of reasons not to at this point, and every time an opportunity came up to betray me, he chose otherwise.

Huh. Was Querit a friend, now? No, not yet, probably not ever. But a colleague? That felt right. He was an ally, one I found myself trusting, but it had still only been a few months. He could still be playing a long game, but if so, it wasn’t anything to do with Ammun. That, if nothing else, I was confident in.

I turned my attention to Ashinder and the scrying mirror. Mana raced through the inscriptions as I activated them and started guiding the spell through the series of relays I’d laid across thousands and thousands of miles.

“Take control of the spell,” I instructed the diviner.

He took the handover clumsily, but I compensated and kept everything stable until he was ready. Then, we plunged through the summit’s outer walls. I studied the wards carefully as Ashinder guided the mirror through them, stopping twice to complete verification checks on his spell signature. There was a weakness there, one I could exploit as long as I did it before Ammun revoked access.

The scrying spell broke into the interior of the summit, revealing the same silvery gray stone that made up the tower. No surprise there. Ammun had never been terribly original, and it made sense that he’d stick with a design he knew would work. Still, I’d have expected a more dramatic change to his warding schemes after what I’d done to his tower. It had taken him months to fix everything I’d broken in less than ten minutes.

As far as I could tell, the only thing stopping me from doing the same thing here was that I didn’t know where the master control room was yet. Based on what Ashinder and the other diviners had shown me, I could make a few educated guesses as to where it might be. Seeing the wards for myself, I was even more sure of my speculations.

This was just about as perfect a situation as I could ask for. I’d found Ammun’s secret base. I knew the majority of the interior’s layout. I was familiar with the ward setup. The only way this could be easier was if Ammun left.

He was going to be a problem, but one I thought I could take care of once I utilized my new mana resonance point. I just needed to confirm that this moon beam weapon wasn’t going to descend on the valley in the next six hours first. And to do that, I needed Ashinder to guide me to where the other shift of diviners was busy working.

That wasn’t hard to find, mostly because it was in the most obvious place. It didn’t hurt that Ashinder had already told me where he’d been working. The very center of the summit was a series of six rooms stacked on top of each other, open-floored with ringed balconies to make a silo. All of them were worked with divination runes and hooked up to mana banks. The signal started in the bottom level and, as it was pushed upward, it grew stronger and stronger until the top room sent it off-planet to reach the moon.

We took a quick tour of each room, with Ashinder explaining what they’d done there. All but the top-most room was complete, and in that, close to a hundred diviners worked feverishly while several dozen mages with stage four cores watched over them. Ammun himself was presumably busy working on something else and was nowhere to be found.

“If I destroy these rooms, that would set him back over a year,” I said. “More, really, since he lost half his diviner corps today. Thinning out the other half could very well stop this project for good.”

I didn’t believe that. In the worst case, Ammun would step in and do the rituals himself. Liches were very, very good at completing rituals that should require whole cabals by themselves. It was one of the advantages of their undead state; they didn’t generate their own mana anymore, but they were capable of controlling enormous amounts of it without tiring or losing focus.

The most important takeaway from our little spying mission was that I still had that most precious of resources available: time. I could finish my advancement and take a few hours to recover, then launch my attack against the summit without fear of a moon beam destroying my demesne.

“I think we’ve learned everything we need to,” I said. “Go ahead and—”

Ammun appeared in the middle of the room in a swirl of black robes trimmed in indigo. He floated in the air, his skeletal body fully on display and the burning red pits of his eyes scouring the diviners. “Which one of you incompetent idiots let the runes defending the scrying center from Keiran run out of mana?” he demanded.

“Ah, looks like he knows about the other diviners,” I said. “That’s unfortunate. I was hoping we’d have a few more hours before that got back to him.”

When no one answered, the lich picked a diviner seemingly at random and lifted him with a pointed finger and a powerful telekinesis spell. “You. You’re supposed to be in charge here. Explain this.”

“Lord Ammun, I don’t know what you mean! The runes were fully charged at the end of our shift. There’s no way they could be drained already.”

“Excuses!” the lich roared as he flung the unfortunate diviner away. Ashinder winced when the man hit the stone wall and slid down to the ground, but I could see he wasn’t dead. Despite Ammun’s apparent rage, he wasn’t willing to destroy important resources just because he was angry. The display was a calculated thing, perhaps some sort of motivational ploy to make the remaining diviners work harder.

Ammun’s eyes swept across the room again, then stopped and darted back to land on my scrying spell. “So you know about this place now,” he said. “Of course you do. You’re too clever by far. But I know your weaknesses, too. Averin!”

One of the mages who’d been guarding the room flew up into the air and approached Ammun. “Yes, my lord?” he asked. I recognized the man as the former leader of the Breakers of Chains, the man who’d lied to everyone in order to release Ammun from his thousand-year stasis.

“Take Ghaldiral to the village we’ve discovered, New Alkerist. Destroy it.”

“Yes, Lord Ammun!”

Then the lich sent out a wave of dispelling mana and broke my scrying spell. With him being mere feet from it and us channeling it through a dozen relay points, there was no contesting the action. The image faded from the mirror, leaving us in silence.

“It seems the next round of distractions is about to begin,” Querit remarked. “Who is Ghaldiral?”

“No idea,” I said. We both turned to look at Ashinder, who’d gone pale and was trembling.

“Ghaldiral is Ammun’s pet dragon,” the diviner said.