“Perhaps we’ve started on the wrong foot,” Adilar said. “Our intentions were not to spy on you. If we’d wanted to do that, we’d hardly have sent Archmage Bakir to knock on your front door and announce our presence.”
There was some logic to that. While there was every chance I’d have found them anyway, and I’d probably have come at them with a lot more open hostility if they hadn’t taken the time to meet with me first, it was still a much smarter move to not alert me to their existence if they were here to spy on me.
“What are your intentions then?” I asked. “I’m sure you didn’t build this place out in the middle of nowhere, hidden underground and warded against divinations, because you’re here to soak up some sun in a dusty, old, monster-ridden wasteland.”
“No, this place was designed with a different purpose,” Adilar explained.
“Yes, I can see the research equipment. You’ve set up labs to experiment in.”
“Precisely so,” the old-seeming archmage said. “One part of our mission is to… I suppose the best way to say it is that we’re to test you, to confirm that you really are who you say you are.”
“What if I’m not interested in being tested?”
Adilar’s polite expression flickered for an instant, something I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been staring right at him. He wasn’t used to being defied, and he didn’t like it. If he was part of a society of archmages, then he was high up in their ranks, maybe even near the top. I doubted he was in charge, or he wouldn’t be out here in the first place, but he was definitely a man used to being obeyed.
“Please understand that our purpose isn’t to offend you. We are simply doing our best to ensure that the world never suffers again as it did when Ammun last walked the lands.”
“That doesn’t explain why you’re here. If you’re so worried about Ammun, you’ve got a couple thousand miles to go to reach his demesne.”
“Oh, we are. As we speak, another six of our members are building something similar in the Selivar Region. The Global Order is devoting quite a lot of resources to ensuring this conflict doesn’t escalate to the heights it reached the last time Ammun got into a fight with someone.”
Once again, that was fair. It made sense. It was logical. It completely justified their presence here. And I didn’t doubt that it was all true. I just didn’t believe it was the whole truth.
“None of that explains why you were trying to hide from me,” I said flatly. “I’d like a reason for that.”
“We’re not trying to hide from you. We simply haven’t reached the point where we were ready to reach out as your new neighbors. We’ve barely been here a few hours!”
“No. I don’t believe you’re so incompetent that you really thought it was a smart move to build a fortified bunker a few hundred miles away from my demesne without informing me that you were going to do it first. Who in their right mind would think that was acceptable?”
“You don’t own this entire corner of Olpahun,” Nevlac snapped. “We’re not under any obligation to—”
“That’s enough,” Adilar interrupted. The younger of the pair subsided with a huff, ceding the conversation back to his boss. “Archmage Keiran, please tell me what proof you need us to provide to convince you that the construction of this research lab was not planned in any way to be a precursor to hostilities toward you.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Can you go back in time a few hours and tell me you’re planning on setting up a base here before I catch you doing it behind my back?”
Adilar was unable to keep his face smooth. “You know we can’t. This behavior is unfitting of the archmage you supposedly are. You act like a petulant child when we have arrived here solely to extend a hand in friendship to you.”
“Is that what you’re doing? Because most friends don’t sneak up behind me,” I said. “How would you feel if I traveled over to Jeshaem and built myself a secret bunker near your headquarters?”
“You’d never manage it,” Nevlac sneered.
“Neither did you,” I said dryly.
“I—”
“Archmage Nevlac, I believe I told you that you had said enough already,” Adilar said. Turning back to me, he added, “I see now that we’ve erred in how we’ve gone about our business. It was not our intent to deceive you, but I can hardly blame you for interpreting our actions in a less than charitable light, especially considering your involvement in an ongoing dispute with another archmage. Please, accept my apology on behalf of the Global Order of the Arcane, and rest assured, moving forward we shall make every effort to keep you apprised of our goals while we remain in this area.”
That was smooth. There was the apology made with the assumption that my only objection was to the manner that they’d arrived, not to them being here, coupled with a resolution to be a better neighbor moving forward.
I could make more of an issue of it. I could demand that they leave. I could fight them over it. I’d probably even win, from what I could see. But if they were being honest about all of this—not that I believed that for a second—all I’d accomplish was alienating a potential ally. That wasn’t really necessary, and besides, I’d already accomplished my goal here.
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I’d kept them focused directly on me, and upset them enough that they’d shown no signs of realizing I’d released a few hundred infiltrators into their brand-new base of operations. Those ants had already made their way into the cracks in the stone and established a full connection with the gestalt entity. No matter what wards this trio put up now, it would do them no good. My spies were literally in the walls.
I took a breath and pretended to wipe annoyance off my face. “Fine,” I said shortly. “Let’s start over. Welcome to the island. I look forward to a productive, open, honest relationship between your cabal and myself. Why don’t we talk about your objectives while you’re here, and what I can do to help you achieve them.”
I sensed a few more threads of telepathic communication flicker between them, mostly from Adilar to the other two. “It’s nothing too special,” the old man said. “The island has remarkably low mana density, the lowest we’ve ever seen. We have a few experiments we do every time we come across a new area to test how specific enchantments will respond, but those are boring. We’re actually far more interested in trading knowledge with you and forging a partnership to stop Ammun from recreating his world-shattering weapon from the days of old.”
“Oh? Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?”
“Nothing specific. I’m sure you’re aware of just how much was lost to history. We have no idea how much, really. I’d like to think that we’ve done a good job recovering and preserving the vast majority of those spells, rituals, techniques, and so on, but it’s hard to say when we don’t know what we don’t know.”
“And you’d like me to help fill in the blanks,” I surmised.
“Precisely, yes. And in return, we hope that our expertise and manpower can help you. Or rather, that we can help each other prevent another disaster from befalling Manoch.”
“I’m sure I can think of a few tasks I could use some extra help with,” I said. In truth, I already had a small list of projects I wanted to hand off to them, but all of that required some amount of trust that I just didn’t have. The way they’d tried to sneak in, probably with the intent of spying on me to learn all they could before they made contact. I could understand why they’d done it, but that didn’t change the fact that those were the actions of an enemy.
At best, we could be political allies, which were practically the same thing. It was just a matter of timing and convenience that separated them. The Global Order definitely wasn’t the answer to my current predicament with my mana core. I trusted Querit far, far more than I trusted any of the three in this room, and I didn’t see that changing anytime soon.
We made small talk for another half an hour or so while Adilar danced around revealing anything he didn’t want me to know without making it seem like he was doing any such thing. The other two mostly kept their mouths shut or made neutral statements that amounted to nothing substantial. I briefly considered poking at Nevlac, whose temper would almost certainly get him in trouble saying something he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t necessary.
The gestalt would get their secrets from them.
“As enlightening as this has been, I do have my own work to get back to. Send someone to let me know when you’ve finished setting up and are ready to properly receive visitors, please,” I said as I stood from my seat at the table.
“Of course. It was a pleasure meeting you, Archmage Keiran,” Adilar said. “And again, I apologize for our social faux pas in failing to inform you of our presence immediately.”
* * *
“That guy is a giant asshole,” Nevlac said after I’d gone.
“He is certainly… arrogant,” Adilar agreed. “He wasn’t wrong, though. I would not have advertised our presence to him so soon, not until we’d had a chance to get a read on him first.”
“Do you think he can be useful to the Order, Master?” Bakir asked.
“Perhaps. He’s certainly competent. I’m not sure how else to explain how he grew so powerful in this dry, barren desert but to accept his reincarnation story. He may truly be the legend of myth, in which case, we are playing an extremely dangerous game.”
I stood in my scrying chamber, the connection I’d forged between my own mirror and the gestalt’s feeding me a view of the Order’s new compound via the thousand or so ants still there. I doubted I would have been able to interpret what those ants could sense into anything intelligible on my own, but the gestalt took care of that for me.
“He didn’t seem that strong to me,” Nevlac argued.
“Then you are a fool,” Adilar said sharply. “He is beyond any of us already. We must discover how he broke the barrier and ascended past stage six.”
“You’re sure he truly has? I’ve met with him twice now and have sensed no such thing,” Bakir said.
The old archmage nodded. “When he teleported away, did you not feel his mana?”
“It was… dense,” Bakir said. “What does that mean?”
This guy called himself an archmage? I was right all along. This whole group was a bunch of posers. They’d be teaching assistants for graduate classes at any academy in the old world. Well, maybe not Adilar and any on his level, but Bakir and Nevlac definitely weren’t what I’d recognize as true archmages.
“It goes by many names. You would perhaps recognize it as true arcana. It is a form of supercharged mana, necessary for forging the greatest of spells, magic so strong that mana itself crumbles under the weight of its casting. To wield it so casually, though…”
The old man trailed off and stared at the wall while his hand grasped the cane he leaned on so tightly that his knuckles turned white. Slowly, he shook his head. “Whether he is truly Keiran of the Night Vale returned after millennia of absence, or merely some imposter claiming the name, we would be utter fools to challenge him openly.
“I tell you this, though. We must know where he found a resonance point. If we do nothing else with our time here, obtaining that information is worth any cost.”
“It’s a shame his guard will be up now,” Bakir said thoughtfully. “All our plans to divine his locations and actions are too dangerous to implement now.”
“Agreed,” Avilar said. “We’ll have to negotiate in good faith for the location.”
Nevlac scoffed. “I still don’t see why we can’t just take it by force. There are three of us here, and if that somehow isn’t enough, we can always call in reinforcements.”
“Perhaps,” Avilar agreed. “Perhaps. For now, diplomacy.”
Great. That was just what I needed. Like I didn’t have enough problems occupying my attention already. Now I had some sort of group of wannabe-archmage thugs looking for a handout and threatening a beating if I didn’t comply.
‘Keep a close eye on them and let me know what they’re doing?’ I asked the gestalt. ‘I’ve got some other stuff to take care of right now.’
‘We will do as you ask,’ the entity replied. ‘For as long as you can afford to pay the price.’
There was no need to remind me of that, either.