There were three mages waiting for us at Derro’s platform, all of them with anxious looks on their faces. Zara froze for a second when she saw them, then asked, “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you, of course. Your father… he was not happy with your decision to leave…”
“I do not need his permission,” she snapped.
Before anyone else could say anything, I raised a hand and cut in, “I’m not terribly interested in this piece of drama. Zara, unless we have any more business, I’ll leave you to sort this out while I go take care of things.”
“No, this isn’t something you need to worry about,” she told me. “Though don’t be surprised if someone hunts you down with an invitation to speak to Father before you leave.”
“Maybe just let him know I’m preemptively declining,” I said as I floated up into the air. Despite the city’s restoration project, Keeper’s home hadn’t moved since she’d been forced to relocate out from under the palace after the Wolf Pack’s defeat. It was still what was essentially a refurbished warehouse in the inner city, stuffed full of tens of thousands of books. It was nowhere near as physically secure as her original archives, but the building was so heavily warded that I was certain she was getting mana from an outside source.
I flew over the inner wall, mentally shrugging off all the alarms and tracers that had just tried to go off with a burst of mana. There’d been a time when that wall had been a major obstacle, all but impenetrable with the enchantments laid on it. I’d barely had the mana budget to expend on just studying the wall back then, and I’d been forced to do it by standing right next to it and dodging patrols.
Now it was no more effort than parting a curtain, though to be fair, I didn’t care if anyone saw me these days. Also to be fair, if I did care, I could have easily slipped through the ward screen extending up over the wall anyway, and been invisible to the eye while I did it. My childhood years truly had been a frustrating time, and it was good to have some measure of my old power back.
A number of people saw me as I flew over the city, including an entire squad of Enforcers that tried to wave me down and gave half-hearted chase when I ignored them, but no one actually got in my way. A minute or so later, I landed outside the front door of Keeper’s new archive and knocked. While I waited for her to answer, I took a moment to study the wards.
Nothing looked to have changed since the last time we’d spoken a few years back. The stonework was battered, reinforced by magic to keep it upright. The windows were sealed, not with glass, but with some sort of transmuted sandstone that looked like it had been grown in to fill the holes in the building. Was this how they were doing their restoration work?
While I was examining Keeper’s privacy wards, I noted her approaching the front door. She paused about thirty feet away, glanced at my scrying spell, and sighed. “I see the wards need a bit of work,” she said. “You might as well come in and save me the extra steps.”
I walked through the door without bothering to open it, the wards there also insufficient to keep me out. That earned me another sigh and an eyeroll, followed by a beckoning gesture as she started the trip back to her office. She was walking a lot slower these days than when I’d first met her, probably as a consequence of reduced mana budget with no room for life extension spells in it.
I followed her in and dropped down in the chair opposite her desk while she slowly settled herself into her own seat. When she was done, she looked over at me. One of her eyes was green, the other blue. It was the blue one that was fake, an old piece of magical equipment called a memory sphere that someone had decided should be shaped as an eyeball and inserted into the mage’s skull instead of left as a freestanding device.
I never had gotten the details on that one and could only assume that its original owner simply liked the way it looked. Certainly no mage who could afford to have a custom memory sphere commissioned was too poor to have a missing eyeball regrown. There was no good reason for it to have been built that way, but Keeper had felt it was valuable enough to pluck out one of her perfectly functioning eyes to access the memory sphere.
“I heard you found something you wanted my advice on,” I said.
“Something like that. Less advice on what I’ve found and more on what to do with it.”
“What can you do with it? Zara said it was something about some old city infrastructure. I’d assume it’s in shambles by now.”
“Not exactly,” Keeper said. She raised a hand and telekinetically pulled a book off a nearby shelf to her. After a moment of flicking through it, she spun it around and slid it toward me. “If this book is correct, every city built during the Age of Wonders had something like this. Apparently, they controlled all sorts of things in the cities they were installed in, which got me thinking that Derro might have one, too.”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
I scanned through the passage while she spoke. It was a diagram for some sort of complex underground machinery that would theoretically span the entire city, handling public transit, sanitation, security, and provide access to a complex inter-city portal network. We’d had something similar, though far less complicated, when I’d been a child in my previous life.
“Even if something like this exists, the enchantments definitely starved themselves out a thousand years ago,” I said. “I’m sure there are plenty of inscriptions on it, but what makes you think they’ll be more than partially intact?”
“Keep reading,” she said.
Past the basic description were schematics for installation and support infrastructure to allow access to it, including labor prices and estimated construction times. It was all entirely irrelevant since the city being described wasn’t Derro, but I skimmed through the text anyway. Other than the contractors’ estimates taking at least four times longer to install the thing that I felt they needed, I didn’t see anything strange. Maybe the prices were high, as well. I couldn’t be sure since it wasn’t a currency I was familiar with.
It was only when I got to the outlined plan and actually read the materials list that I got it. I drew in a sharp breath and glanced up at Keeper to see her grinning smugly. “And you think Derro has one of these?”
“I’ve got some anecdotal evidence on the history of the city that suggests it might,” she said.
“Thousands of tons…” I muttered to myself. “What are you proposing?”
“I doubt we’ll ever excavate it without your help, and even if we did, what could we do with it besides sell it? I’ve done all the leg work to point you in the right direction. I’ll give you all of that and help in any way I can. In return…”
I didn’t like dealing with Keeper. There was only one thing she wanted: knowledge. Old books, old stories, old skills, it didn’t matter what it was to her, just that it was something she hadn’t seen before. It was always time consuming to make a deal with her, mostly because the only thing I could just give her was books, and her collection was impressively robust already.
“No way,” I said. “For something this valuable, it would be years of work paying you back. You could die before being paid in full.”
“Yes. Mysteel is quite valuable,” she agreed. “Happily for you, I’m beginning to feel my age. What I want now is not more knowledge, but more time to enjoy the knowledge I’ve already collected.”
“Ah.” I leaned forward. “Now that I think we might come to an agreement on.”
“Training in your best life extension techniques and spells and enough mana to keep me going for another two hundred years,” she said.
“The best techniques you’re capable of mastering right now and enough mana for fifty years,” I countered.
“One hundred and fifty and I’ll convince the Hierophant to fence all the mysteel you recover so you don’t have to deal with the hassle.”
“I don’t want to sell it. I want to keep it,” I said.
“Ridiculous. What could you possibly do with that much mysteel?”
I thought about the enormous rent in the world core’s outer mantle, an absolutely mind-boggling quantity of that most precious of metals. A single city’s infrastructure probably wouldn’t have close to enough mysteel to patch it. A dozen cities’ worth might not be enough, and all of this was based on some assumptions that no one else had scavenged this all first.
“Irrelevant,” I told her. “I’m not interested in selling it.”
“Fine. A hundred and twenty years and personal instruction on life extension magic.”
“Instruction, a fifty-year supply of mana, and I will personally make a decade’s worth of potions needed to reverse aging,” I countered.
Keeper glowered at me as she considered my offer. “Make it seventy-five and we’ve got a deal.”
That would set me back quite a bit. “Sixty and I’ll provide the storage crystals.”
That gave her pause. “You… have that much mana on hand?”
“Enough for a few years right now, yes. It’ll take me a month to build up the rest.”
“A month! What kind of mana core do you have now?”
“A very big one that makes mana very, very fast,” I told her. That was a completely true statement, just not one that addressed how I was actually going to get my hands on that much mana. No matter how big my mana core got or how fast I could generate mana, I was never going to outpace an entire forest of living stone. Even when I regained my stage nine core, the bulk of my mana was going to come from my genius loci.
“You’d better not even be thinking of scamming me,” she warned.
I snorted. Now that I knew of the potential existence of a great deal of mysteel beneath the ruins of various ancient cities, I was going to get it one way or another. I’d pay Keeper for the knowledge of where to find this one, but only if we could come to an agreement. My scrying spells were more than developed enough to find it myself if I needed to.
“Sixty years of mana, deliverable in storage crystals provided by me, a decade’s worth of age reversal potions, and personal tutoring in a life extension spell suitable for a mage of your abilities,” I said.
Sixty years was more than enough time for her to get her own situation sorted, and we both knew it. As it stood, she probably had another decade or two left on her own, but age reversal would give her the energy she needed to pursue self-sufficient life extension magic.
“You know how to raise your core to stage three,” she said. “Teach me how, as well.”
“I will give you a lesson and a primer on the process. You’ll have to make your own arrangements for completing it.”
“Agreed.”
I was giving up a good bit, more than the information was probably worth, but at this point it was to reinforce Keeper’s behavior. She’d gone digging, noticed something, and researched it to the point that she felt she had a valuable find. And then she’d brought it to me. The next time she found something like that, I wanted her to do the same thing.
“Show me what you’ve put together so far,” I said.