Despite Bakir’s repeated proclamations that Adilar was who I needed to talk to—that the whole reason the senior archmage had come to my home was specifically to negotiate with me—he still guided me along the teleportation chains across the ocean.
The Order had spent a considerable amount of time and effort surveying that route. They’d settled on six islands anywhere from three to five hundred miles apart, determined mostly by mana density. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was an abundant amount of thriving plant life that produced excess mana. For a mage who couldn’t afford to chain six teleportation spells in a row, which was most of them, the islands allowed them to skim mana from the trees to replenish themselves for the next jump.
For us, it was merely a stretch of beautiful and varied scenery on our way to the eastern continent of Jeshaem. Unlike Olpahun, the landmass was still in one piece. It wasn’t much of a surprise, considering no one had fired a mana beam from the heavens into it, nor had anyone drilled down to the core of the world and ruptured it while simultaneously destroying a moon and raining massive chunks of stone down on the continent.
I really had gotten unlucky being reborn in the absolute deadest part of the entire planet. But I’d made it work in the end, and it wouldn’t have changed much in the long term either way. Besides, if I’d been born elsewhere, my family would all still be unwitting mana slaves to the Wolf Pack. If nothing else, some good for the world had come out of my new life.
The Order’s teleportation platforms were even more outdated on the islands than the one I’d spotted inside their base. In fact, they were the next best thing to worthless, taking so long to activate and being so inefficient that the only reason to use them at all was that they were pointed at the next stop along the chain.
“I’m guessing your cabal doesn’t travel across the ocean often enough to make a permanent portal worth the cost to maintain?” I asked as I set up to do the fourth teleport. I hadn’t imagined quite this many platforms forming the chain, but apparently their teleportation spells didn’t have the range I was used to. It might actually be cheaper to use a single portal, if they could do it.
“I suppose not,” Bakir said.
“You suppose? You don’t sound sure.”
“Permanent portals are… cost prohibitive.”
“Not if you make them properly,” I muttered to myself. Maybe that was something else that had been lost. Ammun was the only other mage I’d seen use a portal.
When we reached the last jump, I caught a whiff of mana coming from my unwilling travel companion, some sort of divination. Apparently, he’d gained just enough to cast some sort of communication spell, probably up ahead to warn of our coming. “Do you need to stall me for a few minutes while they get ready for us?” I asked casually.
He jerked in place, an almost comical look of panic crossing his features. “What? No, no. I didn’t… How did you…”
I gave Bakir a few moments to pull himself together, but, as amusing as it was to watch him flail wildly, it wasn’t productive, and I was already wasting enough of my time dealing with the Order. “Relax. I don’t care if they’re aware that we’re coming. In fact, it’s better that way. Maybe we can get this taken care of quickly.”
“You are perhaps a bit too overconfident, Archmage Keiran.”
“It’s only overconfidence if I’m wrong, and that doesn’t happen too often.”
An image of Ammun’s golem beating the hell out of me while I struggled to find air to breathe up on Yulitar flashed through my mind. There had been a few occasions where I had been overconfident, but I’d done a lot of prep work while I waited for him to find a way back down to the planet. Our next fight would be very different, no matter how much mana he’d claimed.
“Perhaps,” he allowed. “Still, to go against so many of equal strength alone seems foolish to me. No matter how many esoteric techniques you know that have been lost over the centuries, I cannot imagine an ending that doesn’t go poorly for you.”
“Then you lack imagination,” I said bluntly. “Ready?”
“I’ve done my duty as well as I can in these circumstances,” he said.
I finished the final teleportation and let the magic carry us away.
* * *
Whatever ambush Bakir might have been hoping to see—and it couldn’t have been much of one given how little notice he’d given whoever was at the end of the last stop on the chain of platforms—it failed to materialize when we reached Jeshaem. That was probably my fault, since I’d altered the destination of the final teleport to be three miles north of where the last platform was located.
“Wha—” he said, clearly confused.
“Sorry about that. It seemed easier to just avoid customs, and it’s not like we’re going to be here very long anyway.” Though I had sent some scrying spells out toward the platform’s actual destination to see if I could spot a few more Order mages. So far, no one had managed to show up.
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“But you can’t… You didn’t change the rune structure… How?”
“Oh, I didn’t use the platform for the last jump.”
“Then how did you cast the spell so quickly? It should take twenty minutes to do it manually, not to mention needing to scry out an unfamiliar destination first.”
I laughed and clapped the pretend-archmage on the shoulder. “You’ve still got a lot to learn. Don’t worry, you’ll get there someday.”
Bakir gave a weak laugh, but I could see the wheels turning in his head. Good. That was what I wanted. His cabal had underestimated me by a significant margin and I needed my involuntary emissary paving the way to his leadership for me. Hopefully, this would impress upon them how monumentally they’d screwed up trying to spy on me while hashing out deals with my enemies.
“Now, where do we go from here?” I asked.
“I suppose the best place to start would be Ibasha,” he said slowly. “Archmage Tredor frequently works out of the research center there. He’s on the Elder Council. If anyone can get you directly in front of them, it’s him.”
“Fantastic. Which way is that and how far do we need to teleport?”
Bakir’s mana regeneration was somewhat obscured by his core shielding, but I was sure he didn’t have any sort of lossless casting technique, and unless his regeneration dwarfed mine, he’d probably spent almost everything he’d regained sending out that little warning. He’d be helpless for the next ten or twenty minutes.
“I’m afraid I’m not familiar enough with the local geography to just point directly toward the city from here. I would normally use a teleportation platform, and it was not inside my sphere of responsibilities to coordinate trade caravans between cities for the Order’s use.”
“Well, I am afraid that I was dead for the whole planetary rearrangement thing, not to mention how many new kingdoms rose and fell during those thousands of years. So I’m going to need you to step up and point me in the right direction here.”
I lifted us both into the sky and gestured around. “I’m not expecting you to just pick out a city you’ve never had to physically travel to, but let’s get moving. We can narrow it down as we get closer.”
“It would be far easier to simply return to the city and use the teleportation platform,” Bakir argued.
“I’m sure it would, and that nobody there is waiting for us to show up so they can rescue you from my clutches.” They still weren’t. Their response time was horrible, but I didn’t need Bakir making contact with them just yet.
The other archmage gave me a tight-lipped frown. I returned the look with a bland stare.
“Has anyone ever told you that you are unnecessarily confrontational?” he asked.
“Not in those exact words.”
“Then it’s good for you to hear it now,” Bakir told me. “I apologize that we’ve given you the impression that the Global Order of the Arcane is your enemy. That was not our intent. I have done my best to be reasonable while you have this… Whatever it is you’re doing right now. But I cannot and will not entertain these ridiculous demands further. Now, I you will return my mana crystal and release me. If you still wish to meet with those in control of the Order, we can return to the teleportation platform and I will do my best to guide you from there.”
“You demand, do you? And what are you going to do when I refuse, Bakir? Do you have enough mana to save yourself if I let you fall right now? Let’s not forgot what position you’re currently in. You showed up, uninvited, and started interrogating friends and allies of mine, looking to dig up anything you can. Members of your cabal are currently consorting with my enemies.
“So yes, the impression you’ve given me is that I would be an idiot to trust you. Frankly, the only reason I’m here is to eliminate a threat. Now, I think that you personally are just doing what you’ve been ordered to do without any real understanding of the motivations and goals of your superiors. But make no mistake, I will crush you if you get in my way. Now, make yourself useful before I decide that I have no more use for you.
“Which. Way. To. Ibasha.”
Bakir regarded me, his face pale and his hands trembling. I couldn’t tell if it was fear or rage coursing through him. “You are a fool, Keiran.”
Then he activated that recall pin stored inside his leg. The teleportation effect took hold of him, pulling him away from me too fast for respond. It sent him fifty miles straight east, presumably landing him at ground level when he came out of the spell.
“The hard way it is,” I muttered as I triggered the divination I’d added to the enchantment to point me in the right direction. Cooperation might have saved Bakir’s life, but I didn’t see him surviving this whole fiasco at this rate.
It would take me perhaps ten minutes to fly to his new location, time enough for him to regain some mana and call for help. Perfect. Whoever showed up would lead me to the next link in the chain, and if that failed, it wasn’t like my ability to track Bakir would suddenly vanish.
I cloaked myself in invisibility and hurtled through the sky, my magic a wedge that split the air around me to increase my speed. I had to channel an aura of silence just to keep my passage from cracking like thunder, else there’d be no point in keeping myself invisible, but it was hardly an issue.
While I flew, I considered my repertoire of tracking and divining spells. I’d already tagged Bakir with the needed beacon, and it would propagate to the next person to get near him. If they were as unskilled as Bakir himself, I wasn’t worried about the magic being detected. But I did want to arrive in time to physically witness the arrival of whoever showed up.
Instead, I arrived at a patch of bare rock with blood splattered all over it. The metal pin was sitting in the sun, still glistening red and wet from being dug out of Bakir’s leg. Apparently, I hadn’t given him enough credit for noticing my attempts at subtly weaving another enchantment into it. I really hadn’t thought he’d caught my meddling, but it wouldn’t save him.
Altering his emergency escape trinket had been the most blatant portion of the tracking spells I’d saddled him with. And even if I hadn’t, Bakir had basically no mana and had wasted valuable time carving up his leg. He wasn’t limping too far from here, not without help.
I swept the area with a simple scrying spell, one designed to home in on the beacon I’d left on him. He was two miles south of me, sitting in a cave with his back to the wall while another man fiddled with a screen of brush designed to hide the entrance.
“That ought to keep us from being spotted by anyone flying overhead,” the man said.
“Don’t be so sure,” Bakir told him through gritted teeth. “He somehow found the evacuation enchantment and modified it to let him track where it took me. I imagine he’ll find it in the next hour or so. We should go deeper before he starts getting close.”
“Can you keep walking?”
“Another minute to finish this healing spell. Those storage crystals had terrible transference rates.”
That was interesting. I spun off another scrying spell and sent it deeper into the cave to see if I could find their destination while I hovered, invisible, in the sky above the entrance. One way or another, they were going to lead me to where I wanted to go.