Vaes City. The royal capital of Veor, seat of the government, current location of the mad king Farshen, future home of the sorcerer-king Sekir – assuming Jair didn't stop him first – and one of Jair’s favorite places in Veor.
Which wasn't saying much, since he hated most of the place, but at least Vaes City had a degree of decorum about it that Astralla City and the twin trade cities didn't even bother to pretend to.
Vaes City, to Jair, always had the feeling of being Astralla City’s big brother, the place Astralla really wanted to be. Vaes City had a certain grandeur to it which the wannabe Astralla would never be able to replicate.
It wasn't just the Royal Palace, nor the many many silver fronted marvels of architecture with their spires and angles all glinting in the sunlight. It wasn’t the way a hundred different varieties of desert blooms were carefully curated into beautiful flowering carpets that lined the sides of every road, filled every yard, making the city’s upper districts and lower districts appear like a flowering paradise amid the desert emptiness.
It was more than just the physical appearances that set Vaes City apart. For all its grandeur and all its extravagance, it had a very different standard for its citizens.
It didn’t try to keep people out. While Astralla regulated its immigrants, trying to maintain a high standard for those it allowed in, Vaes simply rewarded excellence, and natural selection took care of the rest.
Half the wealthiest merchants of the Twin Cities, Silvas and Parein, had their personal residences in Vaes City, and the vast majority of upper nobility kept homes there even if they had better ones in their personal oases. Medium or lower nobility like Teretho or even Sarin houses had to make do with homes in Astralla, the imitator.
That was part of what made Astralla so unbearable, its bitterness over not being Vaes. If they tried to make themselves something instead of envying the capital's success, they could have been as much a brother to Vaes as Parein was to Silvas.
So as Jair walked along clean and beautiful streets, between flowering and bountiful gardens and well-kept marvels of architecture, he couldn't help but see what Veor could become.
Right now, the continent was falling apart. Not physically, not losing its edges to the sea, but internally. The oppression and paranoia of King Farshen was only getting worse.
Vaes City may be prosperous and glorious now, but in another year it’d be a battle zone.
No one reacted too dramatically to their presence, apart from the occasional glance at Yast for being an elf. Since he was an elf traveling with an obvious tour guide, he attracted less attention than would an elf traveling alone. Jair’s obvious fluency in Zakvari and the way he translated for Yast when they stopped to grab a meal from one of Vaes City’s less disreputable markets went a long way toward normalizing their presence.
Jair glanced over, his eyes landing on Yast, who was fiddling with Larenok’s transit authorization token again as they walked.
"Maybe that’s it, can they track the key itself?” Jair mused to himself. “It’d be unconventional, but perhaps…”
“Did you say something?”
Jair shook his head, answering in Zakvari. “I have a new plan. We need to test something.”
“Okay.”
“First step is for you to strip. I’ll be back shortly."
Yast regarded Jair with an expression of sheer bafflement. "Strip… as in remove my clothing?"
"Yes. And anything else you carry on your person. That token, jewelry, everything."
Bewildered, Yast complied while Jair went a couple streets over and bought him a simple robe to change into.
Despite knowing they’d be present, Jair still had to suppress an instinctive twitch every time he saw one of the Hyperion guards. Since their job was to protect the royal family, their presence in Vaes City was entirely natural. Expected.
His recent experiences with them had only reinforced the fact that he did not particularly enjoy their presence, company, or existence in general.
Magebreakers as a whole, Jair had little respect for. The ones who trained in groups to take down people of his caliber – not that he had his preferred caliber available at the moment – were more irksome than most.
It was one thing for an archmage to be outfought by another archmage. It was even one thing for an archmage to be taken out by a pair of ambitious upstarts. But an entire squad trained to brute force their way past an archmage's defenses and murder him without care or remorse… that just hit Jair wrong.
He had once taken over this continent.
In one of the loops he usually put out of his mind, one of his more unstable periods of life, he had assassinated King Farshen, fought off Sekir for the first time, and during the lull between Sekir’s first defeat and his eventual inevitable reappearance, Jair himself had taken the throne.
It was a lot more boring than most people thought rulership would be, while also being an inordinate amount of work. But one thing he'd done with great pleasure was disband the Hyperion Guard and dismiss them to the borders to join the coastal defenses.
It was almost worth it just for that.
"My tools…" Yast protested when it became obvious that Jair planned to leave them behind, breaking Jair out of the memory and back to the present.
"We can get you new tools after,” he told Yast. “Whatever supplies you need, I'll provide. These need to stay here."
Yast reluctantly nodded acceptance, and they walked away, leaving the pile of belongings right there before transiting to Hastven instead.
A less populated city than the others, out of the way. The closest thing to ‘rural’ you could get in Veor while still remaining in the primary transit hubs. There were relay stations and private networks that could take you further, but this was the most distance from the capital you could get in a standard relay jump. It took a dozen flashes to get there as it was, Astralla City being a midpoint stop a few from the end. Hastven was often considered part of the Astralla region, in fact, so insignificant it didn’t even warrant its own territory.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
For a moment, Jair considered paying for special access to the coastline network, go visit his family.
Hastven’s claim to fame was… well, nothing particular. It existed. People lived and worked there. It had a few monuments, the occasional exceptional building, but on the whole it was the city most people forgot existed.
Jair fingered his personal transit token, pondering. It had four marks left before it would need to be renewed; he’d need to start thinking about transit fare again now he didn’t have the student token to cover everything.
They had thirty-seven minutes left. Not enough time to reach anywhere worth visiting, though they could turn it into a chase.
Not today, he decided. Right now, they were testing the basics. They could try using alternative networks to outrun the Hyperion another time.
They lingered in the general vicinity of the arrival platform to test Jair's theories, and sure enough, thirty-seven minutes later, the trio of Hyperion appeared and made a beeline straight for them.
"Long-distance it is," Jair murmured, offering no resistance as they restrained Yast and himself, marching them off to their much grander official headquarters in Vaes City. Hastven, being so out of the way, didn’t warrant even a makeshift station like Astralla got.
Two things confirmed: regardless of the tracking method, it was clearly Yast himself they were following, rather than anything he carried, and the tracking method didn’t take time to scan at increasing distances.
Soulspell, almost certainly. Which would be hard to evade, but not as hard as it could be. Soulspells were the strongest and cheapest to cast of any type of spell, but they also tended to be fast-burning.
Something passive like this, that waits until it’s triggered and then transmits the target’s location, might last indefinitely while dormant, but wouldn't last for more than a few days after activation. A similar imprint spell could last a week or more, and a scanning construct could last indefinitely as long as the target didn’t figure out how to remove the trace itself.
But both imprinted spell patterns and constructs followed rules which soulspells broke without concern. Time and distance meant a lot less to a soulspell than to a construct.
If it were a scanner, Jair would expect the difference between Astralla City and Hastven to be at least ten minutes one way or the other. The fact that the time was practically unchanged meant either the scanning location was perfectly equidistant between the two cities, or it was a soulspell.
There was nothing but desert between the two cities, none of the oases were even close to so perfectly positioned, and it was a very strangely specific spot to have engineered if it had been set up that way intentionally.
The simpler answer was that the trace was a soulspell.
To be completely certain, they should transit to Vaes City and stay there, possibly try a loop at both Silvas and Parein as well, but Jair would be willing to bet they’d have the same timing outcome.
Ran had a harder time getting in to visit them at the Vaes station than the Astralla one, but he didn’t need to be that close. Standing in the courtyard was near enough that a quick flash of Temporal Reversion sent them tumbling back through time.
"I am going to pretend not to speak the language," Jair told Yast as they transited to Astralla City several minutes later, the elf having finished his part in the infiltration as usual.
Lorsit had set off into the labyrinth for the vault, and Ran was off chasing down his sandshark. Those two were getting close to having the timing perfected, but Jair still hadn’t figured out who was tracking Yast or how to block it. But there was something else in this whole situation that he wanted to know just as badly.
"Don't mention my being Veori, act as if we are both equally foreign here and need a translator."
Yast, though confused by the directive, nodded. The elf had a decently high tolerance for strangeness, which was one of the reasons Jair liked him so much.
The Hyperion ignored their protests in Zakvari, forcefully escorting them to the station. Jair was separated from Yast shortly after they arrived, locked in a separate room. Jair continued to protest loudly, shouting Zakvari insults and curses and pounding on the door and walls as though that would do anything.
He had to keep up the appearance.
When someone finally came to interrogate him, they didn’t enter the room. The guard instead stood outside and shouted questions through the door.
Jair saw this as an inefficient use of time and resources, but if they wanted to stand outside his door shouting, they had their right.
"Jair Welburne?"
"I don't know what you're saying," Jair shouted back in Zakvari.
"We know you're a student of the Astralla Institute, and that you are a Veori native. This stupid act isn't going to work."
"I don't know what you're saying," Jair repeated in Zakvari.
This continued for some time. Jair never wavered from his line. His ability to act was by now second to none, even if he often didn’t bother to employ it.
Unfortunately, this only resulted in them bringing in Larenok to berate him. When the headmaster failed to get through to him, they shrugged and scheduled the pair of them for Crelys rather than bring in an outside interpreter.
Ran was getting pretty good at his part, evading any hint of guilt, returning to the academy to ensure nothing had gone wrong on that end, then doing his rounds of the Hyperion holdings until finding the one Jair ended up at so they could revert.
“Seriously, though.” Jair shook his head, chuckling. “Since when do student pranks warrant this kind of overreaction? I had to do way more dramatic stuff than this to get sentenced to Crelys in the past.”
“Yast’s involvement. He’s a foreigner. You’re not just a student pulling something, you’re–”
“Potentially a traitor leaking national secrets, yes yes. I’m aware of the principle of it.” Jair sighed. “I hate this place so much.”
"It feels like we’re getting so close, but… so very far."
"Because we are. This is always how it is. There's always one last sticking point that keeps everything from falling in place. But we’ll get there. We're close. We’ll solve it. I have full faith in that."
"I know I keep saying that Maelstrom is the priority, but I'm starting to really look forward to that vacation."
Jair laughed. "Me too. There is so much that I want to show you. I know you have a lot of knowledge as a noble heir, but I'm looking forward to showing you just how much of this world you have no clue about."
“How is Maelstrom doing? It hasn’t had a chance to get out in a few loops now.”
Jair grimaced, the reminder bringing the soul-level battle to keep Maelstrom’s soul from evaporating back to the fore. “It’s a constant strain to maintain, but it’s stable enough for now.”
Sometimes it flared up, but most of the time the sword seemed to understand that it wouldn’t be reaching its body any time soon.
There was also the fact that he’d started to see additional cracks forming in its makeup, which was mildly concerning, but so far it had only been changing the arrangement of the intricate swirling lattice that was Maelstrom’s soul, not adding to or subtracting from its total substance. Some of the larger gaps were splitting, smaller ones growing, new ones forming.
“Still, we should probably hurry.”
Jair wasn’t about to argue with that. But… “Before we start seriously trying to get rid of the tracking, there’s something else I need to find out. It may take a few days, so give me warning before you revert.”
Regardless of what Jair said or did, too many people knew that he was just bluffing about not speaking the language. They hadn’t ever called in the translator, whether that would end up being Sekir or someone unrelated. Which was a problem, when Jair desperately wanted to know whether it was Sekir or someone unrelated.
If simply playing dumb wouldn’t be enough, Jair decided that he needed to change his approach a bit. He couldn't convince anyone of his sincerity so long as they knew him as a student.
They had forty two minutes before anyone would show up. If he was going to play Yast’s ignorant foreign ally, then it was time to take that role seriously.
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