“Why now?” Mother asked. “He never showed any signs before.”
We were gathered around the kitchen table. I’d gone to fetch Father, and Mother and Senica had gone home with a now-soundly napping Nailu in tow. Once the whole family had reassembled, we’d sat down to have what I was expecting to be an unpleasant conversation. Before anyone would discuss that, however, there were questions about Nailu.
“I don’t know. Why do some babies walk faster than others? They just do,” I said. “It’s the same with mana. Nailu’s core is undeveloped and he’s using mana at a fairly basic level. He’s probably a bit young, but on the other hand, he’s the first person in the family to not have to deal with being around draw stones. Have any of the other new children shown any signs of using mana.”
“I… don’t think so? I can ask around.”
“Even if it’s just Nailu, is that really so surprising? I mean, look at the family line. Dad was some prodigy last generation before the old governor died and the governor showed up to steal all the mana,” Senica pointed out. She gestured to herself and said, “And then there’s me. I’m the best mage in town. No, you don’t count, Gravin.”
“I suspect that ‘Gravin’ would have been a competent mage even if I hadn’t regained my memories, assuming there was any chance of anyone becoming a mage in the environment of Old Alkerist.”
“What can I say?” Father preened. “I make good babies.”
Mother rolled her eyes and shoved him. “Seems like I did all the work after the first ten minutes of the process.”
“Hey! I get credit for at least the first twenty!”
“Okay, I do not want to be involved in this conversation,” Senica said.
As amusing as it was to witness, I had a severe lack of free time in my schedule. Even the extra hour I’d taken with Nailu was more than I should have. “You can talk about this, or not, after I’m done,” I told them. “By my best guess, we’ve got less than a week before Ammun returns and I’m not sure how well that’s going to go. It’s time to gather everything up and evacuate.”
“Right. About that—” Father started to say.
“No. You are not staying here. I don’t care what responsibilities you have. This whole town is a target and everyone should be evacuating, but that’s their choice. You four do not have an option. We’re leaving.”
“You can’t just make that decision for us,” Father said hotly.
“You remember the dragon,” I told him. “I fought it bare miles from here. The guy who sent that is coming back. I expect fighting to resume in literal days. What are you going to do when the next dragon shows up, but I’m a thousand miles away fighting Ammun in Ralvost?”
“You said you destroyed that dragon.”
“I doubt that’s the only dragon skeleton left on the planet. And even if it is, there are other threats. I’ve been working to break apart an army of mages and what seems to be a near-infinite number of golems under his command for months now. Ammun has plenty of tools at hand, and it would be foolish to believe that he’s out of options just because I’ve taken steps to stop him from using some of them.”
“We knew this day was coming eventually,” Mother said. “And it’s not permanent.”
“We’ve got a harvest coming in a week,” Father told her. “We can’t leave. Other villages are depending on that food.”
“Hold a town meeting,” I suggested. “Explain the situation to them. Let everyone decide for themselves what they want to do. Either harvest a bit early and lose some of your crop, or leave and hope it’s not too late when you get back. Hope that there still is a crop when you get back. If you get back.
“I’ve got a place prepared for you. It can comfortably support a hundred people for a month. Two hundred can squeeze in, but you’d better tell people to pack food.”
“We’ve got close to five hundred people here,” Father said.
“Then I suppose most of you should evacuate to somewhere else. Derro might be a good idea. You guys figure out who’s going where. I’ll come back tomorrow and help move people. But everyone in this house is going to the safe haven I built for you. That part isn’t negotiable.”
Father started to argue, but I cut him off before he could get going. “Not. Negotiable. I don’t care if you hate me afterward. I don’t care if I have to kidnap all of you to keep you safe. You will survive this.”
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
There wasn’t much new to the conversation after that. Various objections were raised. I shot them down. The evacuation was an inconvenience. Yes, I understood that. No, I didn’t care. No, nobody else had to leave if they didn’t want to. Yes, I did consider it a strong possibility that Ammun would make at least a token effort to sack the town. No, I didn’t think the automated defenses I’d placed here would be enough if he decided to take things seriously.
I cut things short and left soon after. I still needed to check in with Querit to see how he was adjusting to the new frame, and the gestalt always had more work for me to do, either because they’d identified another problem area or because I owed them so much that I literally couldn’t produce all the enchanted trinkets they wanted fast enough.
They did their town hall while I was away, but I got the highlights from Senica. It was an event I was more than happy to have not been a part of. I got plenty of vitriol aimed my way when I came back the next day to transport the hundred people—mostly younger couples with small children—to the refuge I’d built for my parents. A few dozen more people took the teleportation platform to Derro, and a handful of volunteers went in every direction to deliver fair warning to the rest of the villages.
I didn’t expect Ammun to spread his efforts that thin again, not when he’d accomplished so little the first time around, but it didn’t hurt to let people know so they could make their own decisions. If those villages were wiped out, it wouldn’t be because they hadn’t seen it coming.
I just had to hope that I’d predicted enough of what Ammun would and could do that we all survived his return.
* * *
He was late. We were a full three days past his expected return date now, and there was no sign of him. Any attempts of scrying his little tower up on Yulitar had failed, and getting near it was no longer an option since Ammun had extended his wards out past the base of the structure. There were even visual barriers now, making it appear as though the whole area was caught up in some sort of dust storm.
On the one hand, that gave us more time to prepare, but on the other, there wasn’t a lot I could actually do while keeping myself ready to move at a moment’s notice. Any project I started needed to be one I could drop instantly, which ruled out a lot of alchemy and enchanting, since most of those tasks had precise timing requirements. I occupied my time with making more of the consciousness relays the gestalt wanted to expand their domain instead, but even those required some enchantments to be laid down on them. Whichever unlucky unit I was working on when I did finally get the signal was destined to be scrapped out.
“Keiran,” the gestalt said through my scrying mirror. I glanced up at it to see the moon in question still in view on the glass. Rather than how it normally looked if I were to peer up into the night sky, it was covered in a cloud of soft light with brighter strands flowing through it. Ammun’s tower was in the center of its own vortex, one that had been steadily growing until it covered perhaps a tenth of the moon’s surface.
It was far more mana than he needed just to activate the long-range teleportation spell that would bring him back to Manoch, no matter how cobbled together it was. Obviously, he was preparing for a fight when he returned, just as I was doing the same. We’d soon see who’d done the better job of it.
“Movement?” I asked.
“We believe so.”
I studied the moon again. “The mana patterns look the same.”
“Not on Yulitar. On Ralvost. It might not be Ammun, but the timing…”
Had he managed to sneak back down here without anyone noticing? It was certainly possible, and a bit of groundside prep time might help him considerably. “Show me.”
The mirror shifted from displaying Yulitar to a mountain side blanketed in snow. The view was up near the peak, where the snow never really melted. That didn’t mean it was undisturbed, however. In fact, it looked like something huge had erupted out from underneath it, or rather, dozens of somethings.
The view shifted again, this time swinging up to the open sky, where better than a hundred wyverns were winging their way west. For a moment, I mistook them for living, breathing monsters and had to wonder how they’d survived all this time, then I realized the truth. They were dead and preserved in ice and snow all these years.
“Ammun had a cache of undead soldiers left to use after all,” I muttered to myself. A quick calculation of the mana costs required to raise so many monsters back up into their current state revealed all I needed to know about why he hadn’t used them before, and it created a worrying picture of how much mana he had available to him now.
Of the lich himself, there was no sign. I cast my own scrying spell to scan the area for him on the off chance that he was still there, but he’d stayed just long enough to do his work under the frozen sheet of ice, then teleported off somewhere else. All he’d left behind was the disturbed graves of the colony of wyverns.
“Where are they heading? One of the portals, maybe?”
“There is one in that direction, though it’s not the closest one to their current location.”
“Perhaps Ammun doesn’t know about that one. The brakvaw need to get ready for a fight, either way. You’ll let Grandfather know?”
“We already have. He wants to know if you’re coming to assist.”
“No. This is a feint. We need to find Ammun and stop him from doing whatever his real goal is. His people can handle this. They outnumber the enemies several times over.”
“He does not seem pleased by your answer.”
“I wasn’t expecting him to be, but I have to prioritize the whole planet. If he doesn’t want to fight, tell him to break the portals now.”
“Will you set them back up when the fighting ends?”
“If we win, yes, eventually.”
“That does not reassure him. He is sending a wing of fighters to intercept the wyverns, with instructions to retreat back through the portal if they get overwhelmed so that it can be closed.”
It was a risky course, but that was Grandfather’s decision to make. With any luck, everything would work out in his favor. If not, the wyverns might get through and the brakvaw would have to defend Eyrie Peak directly. We’d known this was a possibility, however, and had set up an evacuation portal for noncombatants. That, combined with the battle harnesses, was everything I could do for my allies short of taking the field myself.
“Keep me updated on how the fight’s going, please,” I said. “And keep looking for more signs of Ammun’s activities. As soon as we spot the lich, I’ll be moving to engage him.”