For a second, I thought I’d somehow been teleported back to Derro, to the tunnels deep underground where I'd found Querit. A moment later, I started noticing the differences in the room. If nothing else, it was cold, considerably colder than anywhere I’d been since my reincarnation. The air had a lot less dust in it, too.
The confusing part was that I knew this ritual was a one-way teleportation to the moon. I’d verified the whole thing myself. I even knew that it only worked when the moon was in a certain spot, one that had very little leeway. But, if I was on Yulitar, it looked far, far different than anyone had ever imagined.
Were there cities on the moon? Did a whole civilization exist up here? That seemed impossible, considering astronomy was a hobby many, many mages indulged in, and there were hundreds of spells that allowed them to peer up into the night sky in great detail. Any city would have to be shrouded in some kind of massive camouflaging illusion to avoid detection.
Maybe this wasn’t a city, then. It could be something smaller, a singular building or even a camp. Obviously, at some point in the past, mages had figured out how to overcome extreme distances, and the fact that I was here at all was proof that it was possible to not only reach a moon, but to bring supplies and equipment here. Given that, there was no reason to assume those ancient mages hadn’t started the process of colonizing all six moons, at least until one of them had been destroyed.
Runes glowed on the wall, all in patterns I was intimately familiar with. There were inscriptions for keeping the room clean, for keeping it heated—not that those seemed to be working properly—for creating air and cycling it through purifiers, and many other things. There were even complex workings that manipulated gravity. I could only assume it was a whole suite of effects designed for the singular purpose of mimicking life on Manoch.
The one thing I didn’t see was Ammun or his gaggle of diviners. My first guess was that they were at some kind of control room, and I immediately spun out several scrying spells and sent them out to scour the building for signs of life while I started processing moon mana. It didn’t feel any different than the mana I made myself or harvested from my demesne.
That was something of a relief. It wasn’t that I’d expected the mana to be different, especially not since I’d already obtained a slab of moon core for my own personal use back home, but absorbing it from a moon still circling the planet was a new and novel experience. If there was ever a set of circumstances that might alter the fundamental nature of mana itself, it was here and now.
But no, everything appeared to be fine. As far as I could tell, the mana was just regular old mana. It filled the air the way I remembered Manoch being back in the old days – maybe a little bit thinner than normal, but nothing that unusual. And even that thinness could be partially blamed on all the active runes drawing in mana to keep themselves powered, not that I was complaining about that. Generating breathable air and keeping the temperature from being fatally cold were perfectly acceptable uses of mana.
The diviners found me before I found them. I’d been sitting there for a few minutes, carefully exploring the moon base with my magic to avoid setting off any traps or being spotted by Ammun, when I sensed a foreign scrying spell settle on me. Surprised, I turned to face it fully and quickly cast a tracing spell that would follow it back to its source. Immediately, a vision of a room with an enormous bay window appeared in my mind. The hundred or so diviners were all huddled together there, most of them simply sitting on the floor wherever they could find an out-of-the-way spot to do so. The few that were active and alert were all casting spells, and it was one of those who’d found me.
Her face paled when she realized that I’d noticed her magic and followed it back. “We… might have a problem,” she announced.
“What kind of problem?” one of the other diviners asked.
“Remember that guy we were spying on? The one that Lord Ammun didn’t want finding out anything about what we were doing?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s here.”
That got some attention. A dozen people who’d been slumped over, staring listlessly at the floor between their feet, all snapped upright. Fear spread through the room, and everyone started talking at once.
Ammun wasn’t with the group, and my own scrying spells hadn’t found him, either. The building was impressively large, three floors at least, with plenty of spaces left for me to check, but the diviners were a good place to start asking questions. I traced out a mental map from me to them, then headed in their direction while I held the connection I’d piggybacked on open.
While I walked, I listened in on the conversation. I’d gotten a reputation among Ammun’s people as a major threat, certain death if encountered. I wanted to be a bit offended by that; I’d spared plenty of people, after all, but when I considered that I hadn’t let a single one of them return home, it was hard to fault anyone for thinking the way they did.
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“I’m not here to kill you,” I told them through an audible illusion I remotely cast to their room. “I’m just here for Ammun.”
“How are you even here at all?” one of the diviners asked, his voice on the edge of hysterics. “It’s impossible! We’re not even on the planet anymore!”
“Why would you think that I can’t duplicate a spell you’ve cast?”
“There are eighty-seven of us,” another diviner protested.
“And if I’d needed to transport that many people, I probably would have needed some help, too. Just moving myself was much easier.”
“Impossible,” the diviner whined again. “Impossible.”
“You keep using that word,” I pointed out.
It wasn’t a very long walk, but I’d still expected them to make a run for it. It was only after I arrived that I discovered why they hadn’t. Ammun had locked them in the room. They literally couldn’t escape, and their attempts at stopping me with their own offensive divinations were pathetic. I barely even noticed the weak mind spikes and sensory snares buzzing around me like a cloud of gnats.
“Seriously?” I asked when I stood outside the door. “You’re actually trapped by this?”
It wasn’t even a master-tier spell. It was barely advanced. This group was dangerously overspecialized in divinations if there wasn’t a single mage in there that could break the seal Ammun had left behind. A basic transmutation could defeat this prison just by targeting one of the walls.
“We were asked not to move,” the diviner who’d found me said.
“Ordered to on pain of death is more like it,” another one muttered.
“Ah. I see. It’s not that you can’t defeat the magic. It’s that you’re afraid of the consequences if you do.”
I unceremoniously ripped the mana out of the seal on the door and pulled it open, sparing it just a single glance when I realized it was made of the same reflective metal as that combat frame I’d found Querit in. I never had found the time to investigate that more thoroughly with everything else going on.
“Now then,” I said in my physical voice. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
A cloud of ice barbs distorted and shattered against my shield ward while an orb of solid force smacked against it and was deflected at an angle. No less than three different mages tried to puncture my mana core while a dozen of them cooperatively cast a mind crush spell in an attempt to render me insensate.
I spared a moment to top up the mana reserves in my shield ward and took a second step into the room, only to be greeted with a burst of fire aimed directly at my face. “Now that’s just stupid,” I said. “Are you trying to suffocate us?”
“Better than letting you torture and kill us,” a diviner snarled as he pulled together another powerful conjuration.
Foolishly, he’d chosen a spell that took several seconds to cast while standing mere feet from me. I absently reached out with a tendril of mana and twisted the spell’s framework so hard that the whole thing snapped into pieces, then I repeated the action to six other mages doing the same thing.
“Look, I’m really not here to hurt you. I don’t care about you at all. I just need to know where Ammun is and what he’s trying to do up here.”
“We don’t know where he is,” someone said.
I snorted. “Oh, come on. Who would believe that? A group of diviners trapped in a locked room with nothing to do but use their magic to look around, and you’re telling me you don’t know where your boss is?”
“He’s not in this building. He took Ergl and went…” the diviner trailed off and waved a hand at the giant wall of glass. Beyond it was an endless expanse of fish-belly white stone that eventually faded off into the darkness.
“Ammun went for a walk on the surface of the moon?” I asked. “Huh… okay. Why? And who’s Ergl?”
“His personal golem,” the diviner explained.
I wondered if Querit would be offended or find the comparison hilarious. Maybe it would be better to avoid telling him.
“And as to why Lord Ammun does anything he does… He’s not in the habit of explaining his plans to us.”
That sounded about right. I’d interrogated enough people in Ammun’s organization to know that they rarely had more than unfounded speculations. Still, I’d been hoping these particular people would have some insight into what was going on since they’d been important enough to drag up to the moon.
Or had they been? The spell ritual they’d used had called for that many people and had certainly pulled mana from them to power it, but why would Ammun bring them up here if he was just going to leave them behind? There had to be a reason. He’d built an entire mountain to house the silo with the long-range teleportation ritual.
It couldn’t be as simple as him not being able to puzzle out the ritual and modify it for use by a single person. He’d managed to make it to archmage and then transform himself into a lich. That implied a level of competency that exceeded such a simple task.
Come to think of it, how had he managed to transition to lichdom? That wasn’t something I could picture my old apprentice managing on his own. And he’d stolen a bunch of my ward schema to use on his tower, too. Every spell I’d seen him cast had been powerful, but also brutally straightforward. The cleverest thing I’d personally seen him do was use a decoy phylactery in our first confrontation. I’d only been fooled because it was real, just not attuned to him.
Was it possible that Ammun had just stolen a bunch of spell designs from that insurrectionist faction who’d enslaved a moon core a thousand years ago and wasn’t smart enough to figure out how they actually worked? Had I been giving him far too much credit this entire time?
What did that say about me if my theory was right?
Regardless of whether or not Ammun really was a big dumb metaphorical hammer who’d been propped up to his current level of power by unknown—and probably long dead—backers, he was still a threat now. Whatever his goal here was, I needed to figure it out, find him, and put a stop to it. There was far too much potential mana up here to let him have free rein of it.
“Which way did he go?” I asked. When no one spoke up, I snapped. “You’re going to tell me. I don’t believe for a second that not one of you at least looked out the window to watch him leave. Now. Which. Way.”