It required some patience to get the opening I was searching for. The Order’s new base of operations on the island was too well warded for me to casually enact my plan at my leisure, but I knew they weren’t going to sit in there forever. Sooner or later, they’d have to leave the safety of their underground nest, and then we’d see how good their portable defenses were.
My bet was on ‘not very.’
In the meantime, I got everything set up and turned to testing Senica’s progress on the spells she needed to learn. She was making good progress, already having mastered the first three diagnostic spells and expanding her basic repertoire of healing magic greatly. I had full confidence in her ability to manage the side effects of the ointment herself, though I would have preferred she not use quite so much mana practicing them. Her lossless casting still needed a lot of work.
Querit, unsurprisingly, did not show back up. Considering he was the one who’d been trying to push me into doing something I didn’t want to do, I wasn’t sure why he was so mad. I supposed he’d either get over it, or I’d be out a friend. Maybe I’d feel bad about that later, but right now, I was too busy to play those kinds of games. I could use his help, but I wasn’t going to hunt him down and force a resolution to this conflict.
As long as he didn’t join a hostile faction, I was content to leave him be. And I trusted him not to actively work against me, even if we weren’t really on speaking terms at the moment. That golem was hard to keep tabs on with his ability to take on any form he wanted without resorting to illusion magic, but the gestalt was truly a miracle worker in the divination department. They were keeping a track of a great number of things for me, so many that I suspected I’d be faced with another price increase to continue retaining their services soon.
Well, that was only fair. It would be so much harder to keep track of everything I had the gestalt watching on my own, and it was almost certain that I’d be missing things that simple wards couldn’t discern were worthy of my attention. That marvelous entity deserved far more than I’d offered them already, if only I had time to make whatever they decided they wanted next.
There was one problem, as I discovered when I reached out to the gestalt for an update on the trio of Order mages we were spying on a few days later. ‘The vessels we left there are beginning to die,’ the gestalt told me. ‘There is no food to sustain them.’
‘Nothing at all? The archmages are still human. They must be eating something.’
‘They’re storing their rations in phantom spaces,’ the gestalt explained.
‘Which means you haven’t been able to raid the larder like we’d planned. Damn, that’s an unfortunate complication.’
I didn’t waste time commiserating on the loss of lives. We both knew a few hundred ants meant nothing to the colony. They were there to serve a purpose, and if they all perished in pursuit of that goal, that was an acceptable loss. Unfortunately, that purpose hadn’t been fulfilled. I’d learned a bit about the trio themselves, enough to reinforce my initial impressions of them, but it was vanishingly rare to find someone who conveniently explained everything an eavesdropper wanted to know in expositional dialogue.
That meant that I’d gained a lot of new puzzle pieces, but not only did I not know how they fit together, I wasn’t even sure how many different puzzles they’d come from. None of them had mentioned their counterparts in Ralvost, and none of them had casually rattled off the location of the Order’s home base. I had crossed four or five cities I’d never heard of off the list based on the context of some of their conversations, but that didn’t help much to narrow things down.
‘We will lose our window into their operations within the next two days, and things will become increasingly muddled as more of the vessels succumb,’ the gestalt explained. ‘If there are any final tasks to be completed, it would be best to start them immediately.’
‘I just need to know when Bakir leaves the safety of their base,’ I replied. ‘We can still watch for him to physically leave with some area scrying, but they’ve got that teleportation platform set up in there. He could just vanish somewhere else and we’d never know he left.’
‘Unless you can find some way to get us access to food, or arrange to send in another group of vessels, we’ve reached the end of our ability to help here.’
I probably could just barge in with more ants hidden in my clothes just like last time, but walking into a potential enemy’s base after they’d been given a few weeks to fortify it was not a brilliant strategical maneuver. It was too bad the Order hadn’t come to me in a more reasonable manner. I’d been hoping to offload some of my work onto them in exchange for filling in a lot of blanks in their magical knowledge.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
I didn’t consider myself to be a passionate teacher, but I’d done it often enough over the centuries and magic of the old world had become one of my primary currencies. I had no doubt that I had plenty to offer a group of people who were all stuck at stage six or lower. It was just too hard to trust them at this point after all the snooping around and secrets, especially with another group actively talking to Ammun’s generals.
‘Bakir is leaving,’ the gestalt said abruptly.
I blinked. ‘What? Right now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Huh. That’s… surprisingly good timing.’
‘We knew he was going to leave eventually,’ the gestalt pointed out.
‘Yeah, but still, it’s a lucky break for us. I don’t get those too often.’
‘He appears to be using the teleportation platform. We are observing the spell and tracing his destination.’
I pulled myself through my genius loci to cross my demesne in an instant and appeared in front of Senica. “Hi,” I said. “Sorry, but I’ve had something come up. I need you to head back to New Alkerist for a few hours.”
“What?” was all she managed to get out before I collected the spellbooks and whisked us both to the teleportation platform.
“You’re making good progress, but don’t start trying to fix anything without me there to oversee it the first time. I should have this business taken care of by tonight,” I explained as I activated the platform. “See you soon.”
“Gravin, wait. What’s goi—”
Then the platform activated and spirited her away to our parents’ house. I was going to get an earful about that later, I was sure, but I couldn’t afford to pass up this opportunity just to appease Senica. Hopefully, she’d listen to my warning and not do anything irreversible today.
One more quick trip through my demesne brought me to the space I’d prepared for this abduction. I appeared in the control room adjacent to my trap and sent to the gestalt, ‘I’m ready for Bakir.’
Immediately, they sent back a flood of information. I saw the archmage standing on what appeared to be the top of some stubby little mountain only a few hundred feet tall, barely more than a large hill. It was ringed by trees for a mile in every direction. Those gave way to a sandy beach and then to a blue ocean that stretched past the horizon.
It looked like Bakir was heading back home for some reason, which wasn’t ideal to my plans. He probably wasn’t out of my range just yet, but if he got another teleport off, he would be. I had to move fast if I wanted to catch him.
Fortunately, I’d long since prepared my plan. The only part I was missing was an unguarded target, and I could already tell just from the gestalt’s senses that Bakir’s personal wards were not up to the task of stopping me. With a grim smile, I mentally activated my summoning ritual.
In my mind, I saw Bakir start in surprise and mana flood out of him as he attempted to block the tendrils of magic seeking to pluck him from his perch and drag him through reality to the box I’d prepared for him. Though I did not view him as a real archmage, he was more than capable of defending himself.
I would have given him a passing grade if he were a student fending off a normal mage’s summoning magic. Against even a master mage, he likely would have been successful. His techniques were refined and controlled, obviously something he’d spent many hours practicing. He recognized the danger immediately and didn’t hesitate to fight back.
Against me, he never stood a chance.
Three seconds after the summoning ritual started, Bakir was standing in the middle of a large, empty room made of stone and buried in the mountain that made up my demesne’s northern slope. There were no exits and no light, not that those would hold Bakir in place on their own. For that, I’d carved additional runes into the outside of the box I’d placed my victim in. Those triggered as soon as he appeared, and a hailstorm of mana puncture spells filled the room.
As expected, Bakir’s personal wards stopped each and every one of them from getting through. I’d been hoping the sheer volume would overwhelm his defenses, but I’d probably already used up my entire allotment of luck for the year just getting him into the room.
Waves of disorientation blasted Bakir in succession, never letting up the pressure on his wards. At the same time, a mana draining field attacked the man’s defenses. If it worked, his defenses would be bled dry and him immediately thereafter.
My assault came at Bakir in waves, already set in place long before he was summoned. He resisted the first wave, and the second, and third. Somewhere around the ninth of my thirty-five prepared attacks, his wards buckled completely and I started draining his mana core.
“I surrender,” Bakir called out. “Your trap was well-executed and I am overwhelmed.”
He didn’t sound worried, which I didn’t like. Frowning, I observed him through the divinations built into the walls of the cage as his mana drained away to nothing. That didn’t make him harmless, of course. There was no way he didn’t have at least one mana crystal hidden somewhere on him, and if he’d shielded it properly, I wouldn’t be able to tell unless I physically found it.
Bakir couldn’t reach into a phantom space without any mana of his own, so I didn’t need to worry about him pulling any surprises out of there on the off-chance he had access to one I’d missed. That didn’t eliminate anything he was already carrying on his person, but my divinations would find that now that the wards weren’t blocking them.
Surprisingly, he pulled a hunk of crystal out of his pocket and held it up between two fingers. It was an inch long, deep red with swirls of black through it, and cut with sharp facets into a cube. “I believe you’d like me to relinquish this to your custody, Archmage Keiran?”
“No points for clever deductions,” I said.
“This was truly unnecessary if you merely wished to speak,” Bakir announced to the empty room. “But then, I don’t suppose you wish to speak. If you did, you would have spoken instead of doing all this.”
“Your cabal hasn’t given me much reason to trust you, but no, I’m not planning to kill you if you don’t give me a reason to. I simple need some answers to a few questions.”
I telekinetically plucked the mana crystal from Bakir’s grasp and pulled it away from him. He watched it disappear with a frown, then sighed. “Very well. What can I tell you that will help clear up this misunderstanding?”