Chapter Forty-Four: Breakwater
As it turned out, they weren’t to leave so soon. Scriber had other plans for them, or for Tom, more specifically. He begged and wheedled and whined to Val until she relented, and they settled in for another day and night at least.
The morning after the Gathering, Scriber spent an hour asking him for every single detail on his new skills. He was, as Val had predicted, most interested in Hunter-Gatherer, but he also asked a lot about his pinnacle.
Pinnacles and cycle skills were both interesting to enchanters, Scriber explained, in that they demonstrated a larger range of effects that an Ideal could achieve in just one skill.
Cycles were generally less useful for that purpose, though, as they were modular skills. Essentially, a cycle was just a single skill that traded off increased versatility for an increase in either mana cost, or cooldown, or both. Pinnacle skills were more informative for enchanters because they always showcased an effect from each Ideal.
There was a staggering range of Ideals out there. Some overlapped almost entirely, some were more specific versions of another, others were more general, and yet more were what were called adjacent - Ideals that could be grouped into a ‘family’, like Steel and Iron.
Enchanters placed a high premium on information about the skills that manifested under them. Even two Idealists with the exact same Ideal would not necessarily share any skills, and even very common Ideals would still sometimes manifest extremely rare skills that expanded what effects they were known to produce.
After their discussion, Scriber set Tom to feeding mana from Survival into the enchantments on some coarse sacks. The freshness runes on them would ensure that anything stored inside would keep for far longer than usual.
They were to be distributed amongst those who were willing to scout the orcs for information. Scriber’s idea was that they could be used to store heads, or other body parts, to return with for proof. Tom helped feed the enchantments for at least thirty.
Next, he was fed a steady succession of wooden balls. Each was the size of a peach, comfortably fitting in one hand, and scrawled all over with runes. These Tom filled with mana from Silence.
The idea behind them was that they were to act as a sort of explosive device, activated by threading a tiny amount of mana into them, and then thrown at an enemy. After a small delay, they would send out a pulse of mana, carrying with it a Silence debuff. Scriber hoped they would make the difference for scouts if they ran into any Idealist orcs.
Filling the wooden balls with mana took the entire afternoon, with Tom taking breaks as needed to refill his mana pool. Scriber and his mice ensured a steady flow of newly made devices were ready for him every time he did. Together, they made quite the efficient production line, and by the end of the first afternoon, they had made almost a hundred.
As they worked, The Lord of Blood directed his followers. The impressive man had begun to set up a more permanent state of affairs, directing lackeys to knock together a rough, shed-like structure against one side of the giant rock. The structure was fairly large, though not pretty, and the amount of Idealists kowtowing to him got it done in a hurry.
Tom idly wondered why they followed him as he worked. He could admit the man was charismatic, and even that he made some very good points. But risking the lives of an entire city for a vendetta? He couldn’t condone it. Tom wouldn’t even necessarily have an issue with him getting his revenge when all was said and done, but orcs in the Deep represented a crisis on a completely different scale.
It was not just them that were in danger. Not just Wayrest. The entire world was.
Orcs had driven the other sentient races of The World to live as they did, huddled in their cities. Before they had arrived, infecting the land and spreading, burning and killing wherever they went, humans had lived free. There was danger, still, and there always would be, but The World had not been completely overrun with monsters.
Orcs had caused that. They had pushed humanity into a global retreat, and in their wake, monsters of all kinds had flourished unchecked.
The orcs would do the same again, and worse, if they were allowed.
Tom watched as people came and went from the Lord’s crude shack, hurrying to and fro. Some strode off into the forest, all in different directions, others set about other tasks, cutting down trees for wood, or clearing land for other structures.
More than a few leered at their group as they went about their business, making it clear what they thought of scouting the orcs. Tom thought them fools. They would surely benefit from knowing more about them; they would have to fight them eventually too, after all. They were so caught up in the promise of bloodshed and revenge that they couldn’t see past their own noses.
Val, Jace, Moth and Cub all discussed scouting in low tones, Scriber adding the odd comment here and there where his concentration allowed. By nightfall, the day after the Gathering, they had found some thirty who were willing to participate, and had worked out a plan.
They would move in pairs, travelling light and fast, and circle out wide around to the east. Each pair would attempt to narrow down the main orc encampment, try and map their patrols, or hunting parties, if they had many of either, and report back. If they could, and only if the opportunity presented itself, they were to try and gather proof for Wayrest.
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Those they were absolutely sure that they could trust were told to bring that proof straight back to Wayrest, not the Lord. He would be getting plenty of information, and Jace believed he knew more about them than he was letting on anyway. Anything brought to him would surely never make it to the city.
As night fell, they stopped their enchanting and planning, and ate. Scriber produced enchanted cookware from a spatial storage ring, one of many that adorned his hands, and whipped up a surprisingly good stew. He was obviously a man of many talents.
While they ate, Tom took the opportunity to pick Scriber’s brain. He seemed to have taken a liking to him, and the man was a veritable encyclopaedia of information. After watching Scriber’s army of enchanting mice at work all day, one question stood at the forefront of his mind.
“Do you know of any way I can get a swarm essence? I’m missing one for a familiar. And a silence essence for another.”
“You’ll have better luck with the silence than the swarm, and even that won’t be easy,” the enchanter replied. “They coalesce in areas relating to them, but you already know that. If I had one, I’d give it to you in payment for your help today. You need to look for large concentrations of life forms. Village-killer swarms sometimes birth them, though it’s not usually worth the risk of getting so close to one.”
Scriber looked thoughtful for a moment.
“Orcs are supposed to be the most prolific life form in The World, and you’re just about to go scout an infestation. You never know, you might get lucky.”
“Might be they need essences for their own familiars, now that they’re manifesting Ideals. Thank you though, no harm in keeping an eye out, I guess.”
They both lapsed into silence at that. The thought of the coming days was heavy as millstone. Scriber wouldn’t be helping with the scouting, not directly, anyway. He was going to join Cub, and head to his forge, where they would work on producing some new weapons for the upcoming siege. They would have no shortage of work.
Tom cast about for a way to bring them out of their reverie.
“Do we have any fabric?” he asked Scriber.
“Why’s that?”
“Just a thought I had. Could we imbue some with Silence, wrap our feet in it? Most Hunters are stealthy, but guaranteeing our scouts can move without a whisper would be good.”
Scriber just looked at him for a moment, his mice all pausing what they were doing to turn to him as well.
“Not a bad idea. Quick enough to do for thirty people, too,” he said.
He began pulling fabric from a storage space, coarse and brown, yards and yards of it. His mice swarmed to it, pulling it this way and that, their tiny enchanting tools blinking into existence. Some began to fold the excess, feeding it in a steady line to others who straightened it, who then fed it to more who began stitching in tiny enchantments.
Even after watching them work for an entire day, Tom was still floored by their sheer efficiency. With his Ideal, and the value of enchantments, and the sheer output he could manage, Scriber could easily be the wealthiest man in Wayrest if he wished. The wealthiest man in any city, anywhere in the world. And yet he chose to wander around in a forest, helping the exiled and desperate, all for the chance to study strange and unique Ideals. He truly was an odd man.
Scriber’s mice periodically snipped off lengths of fabric with their tools and brought them to him to imbue. As he worked, he listened to Val and Jace and Moth talk with their scouts. They were coordinating where they would move, their routes back, and what to do if they found themselves in a fight.
The talk brought back unpleasant memories for Tom. Of being pursued through the Deep, hunted like an animal, always, always, on the brink of discovery and death. He found himself of two minds about their scouting.
One on hand, he was incredibly nervous. He had seen the orcs up close, had been dragged along with them for days. He knew how brutal, how vicious, they were, and didn’t relish the thought of putting himself in their path again.
On the other hand, he had grown since then. He had manifested his full skillset now. He found himself looking forward to testing himself against them. Not necessarily fighting them, but putting everything he had learned so far with Val to the test. He could imagine no better than pitting them against orcs.
He imagined, were he standing in that same spot, late summer sunlight bending through the trees, a hunting pack bearing down on him again with barks and snarls, that things would go very differently. With all his new skills, he was sure he could at least manage to kill the leader, the huge orc with the glowing chain skills.
Tom idly wondered if he would see that orc again, what his position in their feral society was. He promised himself, if he did run across the beast, that this time, he would kill it.
The orc must have been somewhat high up, but he had no perspective. How many hunting parties did they have ranging the Deep? How fresh was the infection, then? He could have been the biggest orc, charged with leading their first pack, or just one of many, nothing special.
Tom thought about the coming days and weeks with a growing sense of morbid curiosity. He looked forward to finding the answers to these questions. He had always felt that it was better to simply get a distasteful task over with as quickly as possible, and that the worst part of anxiety lay in future unknowns.
Even if the outlook was worse than they expected, at least they would know.
Tom slept surprisingly well that night, and in the morning, all thirty-odd Hunters who’d volunteered to scout readied themselves to move. Tom and Scriber handed each their enchanted items: three wooden silencing balls, one enchanted sack, and two footwraps. A few had used their life-and-death mouse since they’d last seen Scriber, and those he’d replaced without a word. Tom kept his snug in his storage, and hoped he’d never have to use it.
It was not much, but hopefully it might make the difference between life and death for some.
As they gathered in a small group to go, The Lord came to watch from the entryway of his crude shack. His cool gaze struck a counterpoint to the more openly hostile attention of his lackeys.
Tom couldn’t help but shiver as they set out.