While Querit oversaw the experiments I’d outlined, I returned to the jungles around Galdrisa just to do a bit of quick scrying and mark down the locations of any other vine-encrusted plant monsters nearby. I wasn’t interested in harvesting them right now, but I did want to make sure there were more left just in case my assistant accidentally killed the one I’d already collected. There were none quite that big, but it did turn out that they weren’t terribly uncommon for the area.
I sent my shadow out to harvest troll blood while I scried the area, not because we were running low, but just to be efficient. We’d need more eventually, one way or another, and without Senica here slowing down the process by learning, I was able to collect a few thousand gallons worth and process it over the span of an hour or two.
Satisfied with my reconnaissance, I switched focus to the next problem. I still had multiple people demanding my time and attention, but they were all trying to get me to address their issues, and I had enough of my own to deal with already. Whatever Shel wanted was so far away from being important that I didn’t care if I never spoke to her again. Grandfather, however, was a different matter. Eyrie Peak was an important resource, both as a home for my portal network and because the gestalt was living there, and they served as my many eyes across the continent and beyond.
Now that I thought about it, I still needed to check in and see how my rampage across Ralvost had gone. I was hopeful that I’d killed at least two-thirds of Ammun’s standing forces, but I expected the actual number to be somewhat lower. Not only had I failed to target all of the major encampments, but my run against the last one where I’d been sidetracked by Seven had been the farthest thing from thorough.
On the bright side, that was one less of Ammun’s elites I needed to worry about, and that one had been causing a lot of problems over the last few years. It was too bad he’d ended up in the lich’s pocket. With a bit of tutelage, he could have been a fine archmage. Though, his priorities left much to be desired. Still, he’d been young, and that could have been fixed.
Once I was finished securing my harvest, I placed a teleportation platform in a small room in the temple of Galdrisa, sealed it up with stone shaping, and used it to cross as much distance as I could in a single jump. I had to cast the spell manually a second time to reach Eyrie Peak, but that only took a few minutes.
“Is Grandfather here?” I asked one of the platform guards.
Mana shaped itself in the brakvaw’s throat as it cast the spell that allowed it to speak Enotian. “Not here,” it said, with what I had to assume was supposed to be a scowl. It was always hard to tell. Beaks did not lend themselves well to expressing emotion. “Gone for many days now.”
“Still?” I muttered. “What is that old bird up to?”
I wasn’t really asking, but the guard answered me nonetheless. “Pilgrimage to Third Peak.”
“Third what now?”
It was such a generic name that I could think of dozens of different mountains that might qualify, but none of them were holy sites as far as I knew. Then again, it wasn’t like I knew all that much about brakvaw cultural history, and the world was a big place.
“Homeland,” the brakvaw said.
“Ah. I didn’t realize…” I trailed off and shook my head. It wasn’t important and I had enough other problems to deal with. The only relevant part was when Grandfather would be back, and whether or not he actually needed my help. “Do you know how long he’ll be gone for?”
“No. Takes however long it takes.”
This conversation served to remind me that brakvaw as a species weren’t overly concerned with punctuality. Grandfather was a notable exception, but I suspected that was more a consequence of him having dealt with humans in the past, while most of the younger generations had never seen people as anything but prey. In fact, now that I thought about it, I wasn’t sure how old the second-oldest brakvaw was, but I was betting it was several hundred years less than Grandfather himself.
“Alright, well, if he does come back, please let him know I’m still waiting to see what he needs. In the meantime, I need to speak with your other guest.”
Yep, that was definitely a scowl. I hadn’t known beaks could do that. The brakvaw, somewhat ungraciously, waved a wing to send me on my way. I flew off, watching with a divination to make sure it didn’t try anything behind my back.
The brakvaw were never going to do more than tolerate me, it seemed.
* * *
‘You ask much,’ the gestalt spoke in my mind. ‘What will you offer us in return?’
“You were already going to be watching there anyway,” I objected. “All I’m asking is that you keep an eye out for some specific individuals.”
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
‘And how would we know these creatures? We have never seen them. You have never seen them. Humans do not walk around with signs on their necks announcing their status as archmages.’
“I showed you what the one who sought me out looks like. If any other humans show up in his company, it’s a safe bet that they’re people of interest to me.”
‘We agree with this logic, but nevertheless, there remains the matter of payment.’
“Well, what do you want?”
‘We want our own portal, one just for our use.’
That wasn’t a difficult request, providing it exited somewhere I could reach, but there was a snag. “You’d have to power it yourself,” I said. “The brakvaw aren’t going to pour mana into a portal that doesn’t benefit them.”
‘Acceptable,’ the gestalt sent.
An image of a craggy mountainside came to me. I’d never seen this particular one before, but I recognized it as belonging to the mountains that ringed the island we lived on. The gestalt confirmed that guess a moment later when it added a set of reference landmarks to help me lock in the position. It wasn’t enough to teleport to on its own, but I was confident I could find it.
‘The portal should go here. Additionally, we shall require more of your thousand-faceted scrying devices. The ones you’ve given us are already at capacity watching the other locations you wish observed.’
That was a bit more time-consuming than I wanted this deal to be, but it was also kind of a fair request. Observing the entirety of our largest moon and a country several thousand miles away at the same time was no easy task. “I can supply you with one more,” I offered.
‘Four.’
“That’s way more than you should need for a job like this.”
‘They are payment for our services.’
“Two now, and one more after this crisis with Ammun is resolved.”
The gestalt hesitated over that, which was telling when they had so many individual minds working together that they literally thought several times faster than us mere mortals. Eventually, they reached some sort of majority agreement in their collective consciousness and said, ‘Agreed.’
I immediately pulled two of the spheres out of my phantom space and floated them over to the gestalt. ‘You have anticipated our demands,’ they remarked.
“That, or I figured you’d need them sooner or later to fulfill my own requests,” I said. “But I’ve only got these two prepared for now, so the last one will have to wait.”
‘We should have asked for more,’ the gestalt lamented. ‘But the bargain has been struck. We shall watch for these archmages you believe are coming and ensure that they do not collaborate with your enemy.’
“Our enemy,” I corrected. “If Ammun shows up and takes the army back over, it’ll mean more assaults on the island. They won’t spare you if you get in their way.”
‘We do not fear these weak mages.’
“Speaking of weak mages, have you finished counting up what’s left?”
‘Yes. You destroyed roughly one fifth of the gathered humans, and another fifth have deserted their ranks.’
That news soured my mood. Either I’d vastly overestimated how much damage I’d done, or I’d underestimated their numbers. It was probably the former since I’d been using the gestalt’s head count. I wouldn’t get another chance to surprise them like that again, not any time soon again. I could continue to try to thin out the numbers, but it’d be an uphill struggle now.
‘The survivors have regrouped together and are retreating in the direction of the tower,’ the gestalt added. ‘We estimate it will take no longer than a week for them to arrive.’
“Great,” I said. “Just what I needed – a time limit.”
That meant I either needed to give up, infiltrate the tower and waste months on a campaign of assassinations and sabotage, or knock the entire tower down in the next few days. None of those options appealed to me. Was there a fourth option? Could I gather together enough allies to assist me that we could kill thousands of hostile mages out in the field while they marched toward safety?
That seemed unlikely to work. Querit was undoubtedly the most powerful person on my team, after myself, of course. He was roughly equivalent in strength to a stage five or six mage, but his repertoire of spells was decidedly pointed toward research. Even with a proper combat frame, I doubted he’d make a significant impact against an enemy that size, and he’d run the very real risk of being destroyed.
No, he was far more useful to me doing exactly what he was doing. Maybe I could put together some simple traps that dealt a lot of damage over a wide spread area and seed the road with them before the mages got there. Manufacturing them in such a tight timeframe would be difficult at the very least. Damn it. This was exactly the kind of thing having a few dozen archmages to call on would be helpful for.
I might just have to take the loss on this one. I’d taken my shot, done some damage, and escaped unscathed. If it wasn’t as much as I wanted, well, that was the way it went. I’d known there was a strong possibility the survivors would turtle. I’d just been hoping there wouldn’t be so many of them, and that there’d be a significantly higher percentage of deserters.
Still, there was no reason to make it too easy for the survivors to return to the tower. Even if I couldn’t kill all of them, I could still slow them down and inflict some more casualties. My mind churned with ideas as to how best to accomplish that, most of which were wildly impractical for a variety of reasons.
With enough mana to throw at the problem and a little more time, I could probably devastate the retreating force, but there was no point in making a plan using resources I didn’t have. I’d settle for using what I knew had a good chance to work.
“Thank you for your help,” I told the gestalt. “Could you send me everything you’ve got on the army’s current positions?”
‘Of course. That is part of our bargain.’
With that information safely stowed in my head, I started calculating how quickly the various squadrons and contingents were moving, which ones were small enough to be attacked directly and which ones I’d have to scatter traps in their path and hope for the best.
I bade the gestalt farewell and returned to my demesne. I had a lot of work to do and not too much time to get it done. As soon as I got back, I pulled myself directly through the genius loci that inhabited the valley and arrived at my crucible. “Querit,” I said into my portable scrying mirror. “Could you join me? I have a time-sensitive project of high priority.”