I paused in the middle of my preparations to pay more attention to one of my scrying spells. The more miles I had to cover, the slower my progress got, not in the least because Ammun had started using his own magic to actively obfuscate his trail about twenty miles or so from the base. I’d been working for over six hours now, trying to track him down. Considering he’d only had two or three hour’s lead on me, at most, it was ridiculous how much effort it had taken to finally find something worth looking at.
Whether that thing was actually relevant remained to be seen. It was entirely possible I’d found something interesting but ultimately unimportant. Still, this was the first time I’d seen anything more than white rock choked in fine dust. It turned out that Yulitar did have a thin atmosphere, though not something humans could breathe. It did provide enough air currents that a great deal of the landscape was obscured in clouds of dust that slowly drifted for miles and miles before settling back down until the next breeze came by to stir them up again.
And in the middle of all that was a valley that sloped a few thousand feet before it started to rise again. It wasn’t anything special by itself, but it did have several caves in it. Exploring those would have been an enormous expenditure of time except for the fact that one mouth had obviously been artificially enlarged by a significant amount, and not via transmutation.
Broken rubble was scattered across the valley floor, looking for all the world like wet clay that had been scooped up by a giant’s bare hands and casually tossed aside to dry and harden. Moon stone wasn’t anything so soft as that, though, which meant whatever had done this was enormously strong – strong enough to dig.
Perhaps strong enough to dig straight down to the moon’s core?
I never had figured out how Ammun had managed to burrow so deep under Manoch’s surface to build his tower. I’d just assumed he’d done it the hard way over a span of decades or even centuries, one transmutation spell at a time. Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe he’d come up with something better. What had that diviner called the golem he’d brought with him again? Ergl?
I should have asked more questions about that thing before sending them all back to the planet. I’d dismissed it as a concern, though, knowing it couldn’t be anywhere near as powerful as its master and assuming it would be inconsequential to any fight between the two of us. War golems were a known entity and well within my limits to destroy, but I’d been working right next to a sentient golem for months now. I should have given more consideration to the possibility that Ammun’s golem wasn’t there to fight.
So he was digging, presumably to get closer to the moon’s core. Why? Was he going to build another tower up here? Was that what he needed to harness the mana into a weapon? If that was the case, then I couldn’t just leave him stranded up here. Eventually, he’d find a way to attack Manoch’s surface even if he couldn’t get home.
I finished up my preparations for the ritual silo while my scrying spell chased after Ammun through a surprisingly robust network of underground tunnels. It didn’t take much work to figure out where he was going now, not with all the damage being done to any opening that wasn’t large enough for the golem to fit through.
Without warning, my scrying spell was completely shredded. “I guess that’s where he’s at,” I said to myself as I prepared a teleportation spell. A few minutes later, I was standing inside a pitch-black cave, breathing only because I’d taken a considerable amount of air with me. The spell was one used for diving underwater and fighting back pressure, but it had been simple to repurpose it to work here. If anything, it was even easier since it took no effort to hold the air steady against the moon’s natural environment.
Flying, on the other hand, was a bit more complicated. It turned out that spell was calibrated to function in Manoch’s atmosphere and didn’t work so well out here. The best I could manage was a series of long, floaty hops that almost felt like being underwater, and the spell really didn’t do much to make that happen. It did speed up my progress, however, and it wasn’t like it cost me anything, so I relied on that to take me deeper underground.
While I was mastering movement in low gravity, a constant, muted banging sound filled the air. At first, I couldn’t understand what I was hearing, mostly because the weird not-air currents of the moon didn’t seem to be transmitting sound properly. Once I realized that, I figured out that the thumps, which sounded more like someone dropping a book in slow-motion than anything else, was actually the golem digging its way through too-tight tunnels.
Following the distorted sound was impossible, but I didn’t need to. Divinations were enough to keep me on track, and it was too late to keep Ammun from knowing he was being followed. I chased after him, eventually arriving in a large cavern that sloped sharply downward while narrowing into a funnel. The golem was at the bottom, widening the exit, while Ammun floated in the air above him.
I took a moment to analyze that flight spell. It was an obvious sign that the lich had prepared for a trip off-world far more thoroughly than I had, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t copy what he was doing. Adjusting the rune structure to work with the local air wasn’t going to be possible for me, not if I wanted to keep breathing, but it was good to know what to do if the need to move freely became more important than the need to breathe.
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The golem itself was fifteen feet tall and could best be described as lanky. It was thinner than I was, with arms that ended in big hands shaped like scoops. The fingers were pointed spikes of mysteel, designed to drive into stone and fracture it. Its legs were only about three feet long, but it had six of them firmly planted to help it hold its position while it dug. I could see spots where it had anchored itself inside the stone to keep its grip, too.
Surprisingly, this actually wasn’t too far off the standard design of a digging golem used in city infrastructure projects back in my original time. The real changes were in the way it used mana to help it dig and process stone. Spells compacted the stone down to a fraction of its original size, not through transmutation, but through simple force and heat. The lumps it discarded probably would have made for a good building material; that might even have been the original purpose.
I took all of that in over the span of about three seconds, then Ammun spun in place and glared up at me. “I should have expected this,” he growled. “Somehow, you’d find a way to follow me even here.”
“It wasn’t that hard,” I said. “You left everything I needed to know just sitting there.”
“And you just so happened to have close to a hundred capable mages on hand to help,” he sneered. “How convenient that half my corp of diviners deserted at the last second.”
That made sense, even if it was entirely wrong. I decided against correcting Ammun. There was no need for him to realize I’d modified his ritual to work for a single person. “I’ll admit, having to chase you all the way up to Yulitar was a surprise. I was under the impression that the cabal that managed to turn Amodir into a weapon did so directly from the ground.”
Our voices were warped so badly that it would have been impossible to understand each other without a bit of magic to straighten things out. Ammun did that naturally—the act of speaking anywhere was a magical process for him—and I managed it by duplicating the part of his body’s animating magic that did that. It would have been a bit wasteful under normal circumstances, but I was hoping to drag some information about his plans out of him.
“Oh, they did, but not without doing some work up here, first. Foolish little mages. They stumbled across something that could change the world, but failed to understand the true scope of their discovery. They’d barely gotten started duplicating their success on a second moon before they had to unveil their project to the world. Of course, the powers that ruled immediately realized the potential and agreed unanimously that it couldn’t be left in the hands of a group of dissidents.”
“And so you broke the world rather than let anyone else have it,” I finished for him. “And now, what? You’ve been back for two years. Already trying to repeat history?”
It was creepy how much emotion a skinless skull could convey. He had no lips, but I could hear the grin in his voice. “Is that what you think I’m up here to do?” he practically purred. “Master, I’m disappointed. After everything you’ve discovered and all the ways you’ve interfered, you never figured out the end goal of my little moon project?”
He didn’t appear to be bluffing, but I couldn’t think of what else there was up here worth the effort of obtaining it besides the moon core itself. And that was far too big to take anywhere. Destroying it felt equally pointless. So it had to be the mana itself he was after – but why?
“I recognize that look,” Ammun said. “You’ve got a puzzle to ponder over. You know, I used to be so jealous of that expression. You’d stand there for a few seconds, oblivious to the world, and then just suddenly have the solution like it was no effort at all. No matter how complex the problem, you could pull it apart. I always hated that I couldn’t think like that.”
“Yes, I’ve been meaning to ask who helped you achieve your current state,” I said. “After seeing your prowess over our last few years of picking at each other, I’m not inclined to believe you managed it on your own, just like I’m not inclined to believe you came up with whatever plan you’re working toward right now.”
“Always so arrogant,” the lich snarled. “Always so smug and convinced of your own superiority. You just can’t conceive of a world where anyone might be your equal, let alone one of your students.”
The golem stopped digging and pulled itself out of the tunnel. It looked up at me, its one large eye a smooth emerald sphere that reflected my own image. Perhaps it was responding to some mental signal from Ammun, but I doubted it. Undead were practically impossible to affect with things like mind magic, which was a double-edged sword when it came to them connecting their minds to others telepathically. Any orders he gave would need to be verbal or visual.
And yet, the golem had stopped its work and started paying attention to me, which meant that Ergl was smarter than I’d given it credit for. What other surprises did it have in store for me? What other ways could it shape mana – not to dig, but to fight?
“Mana,” I murmured as I looked down at my former apprentice. “Of course. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
The pinpricks in Ammun’s eye sockets erupted in furious red light, but he said nothing.
“An entire moon core for yourself. No one to share it with. It’s a lot of mana, enough to reach all the way to the planet itself. And the distance from Yulitar to Manoch is so great that it would hardly make a difference if you were all the way on the opposite side of the planet from the moon, would it?”
That’s what this was. Ammun was tired of being tied to the tower, which could only pull up the mana a broken world core produced. He wanted the freedom to go anywhere at any time. He was trying to tap into a moon and take its entire mana production for himself, just to ensure that he’d never be so starved that he’d have to go into hibernation again.
He’d be free to hide his phylactery anywhere, no longer bound by distance to it. In theory, there’d be no way to ever truly be rid of him, because it would become impossible to find and break the phylactery. No matter how many times he was destroyed, he’d just come back again.
“I see,” I said softly. Our eyes met. “I can’t let you do this.”
“Kill him, Ergl,” Ammun ordered.