Aaliyah stopped a few steps down the hallway and knelt by the marble she’d placed earlier. With a few quick gestures, she was able to adjust it and flick it further down the hall, where it came to a rest even with the frame of the door they needed to investigate next.
With her trinket keeping an eye on the far end of the hall, she took up a position on the atrium-side of the door they were about to breach. Eresthanon moved into position across from her.
It was an encouraging sign that no one had ambushed Delman, the firefighter with the Magical Response Unit, when he’d done an initial sweep through the building, but it would have been foolish to take anything for granted at an active scene. Even if you couldn’t account for every possibility and sometimes had to make hard choices, risk mitigation was still the name of the game.
Nearly twenty years in law enforcement — first in the Army Military Police Corp, then with the New York Police Department, and now with the Vigiles Creaturae — had taught Aaliyah quite a few things. One was that doorways were where cops went to die. It wasn’t called the ‘fatal funnel’ for nothing, after all.
But she lived in a world of magic, now; a world with much less stringent rules of engagement and where you could get potions, artifacts, gizmos, and all other assorted types of magical doodads. It was impossible to plan for everything, but you could sure as hell try.
Her marble sensor was just one of her tools, and Aaliyah reached into the same pocket to pull yet another. This time, she retrieved three small metal discs, each about the size of a quarter, but slightly convex with a bulge near the center.
She pinched one between each of her fingertips on one hand — like she was preparing to do some kind of coin trick — then, with her other, held up three fingers; this signaled to Eresthanon to follow along as she nodded her head through a countdown. Then, they would breach the door.
On the first nod, she placed her free hand gently on the doorknob and sank down to one knee. She angled her body so she had a clean line of sight to the space under the door.
On the second, she swung the arm holding her discs back, just slightly, then flicked it forward, releasing the metallic objects to slide under the door.
The third she delayed slightly, waiting for a burst of intense light from the thin space beneath the door. When it came, she finished the countdown, turned the knob, and rushed into the room.
She was pleased to note Eresthanon was coming in hot on her heels, moving in a partial crouch to reduce the profile of his silhouette to any hostiles on the other side of the door.
Their precautions turned out to be in vain, as the room was empty. It was a mix of office and lounge, with couches and chairs along one wall and a broad desk taking up much of the other. A bank of silverish screens adorned the wall over the desk. They were blank, showing only a blurry reflection of the room.
Aaliyah scooped up her metal discs from the floor as Eresthanon went to examine the screens. She appreciated that the magical flashbangs had proven unnecessary, but appreciated even more that they were good for half a dozen uses and could be recharged when spent. With a bit of practice, even a magical ignoramus could power the glorious little tactical devices.
“Scrying mirrors,” Eresthanon said quietly. “I believe this is a kind of security or observation post for this chantry.”
Aaliyah pushed the door most of the way closed behind them. “The recent movement from this room might have been one or more of the bodies we saw downstairs. Can you access their system, especially feeds of the intruders?”
“Not in a timely fashion; perhaps not at all,” Eresthanon answered after quietly perusing the mirrored screens for several seconds. “These enchantments are complex and potent; far more potent than any of the orders we’ve seen represented here so far should be able to manage. Unless my knowledge of arcane societies is very much out of date or mistaken.”
“That’s a shame, but not unexpected. We might circle back around to this later, but for now we should keep moving. We’ll use the same procedure to breach any other rooms with recent movement we come across. Got it?”
Eresthanon barely had time to nod agreement before Aaliyah was headed for the hallway. This whole thing was setting her teeth on edge, from top to bottom. Each new piece of the puzzle made the picture just a little bit clearer and she did not like what she was seeing.
Back out in the hall, the two vigilum moved to the last door before the stairway, which only went up. Aaliyah repositioned her marble and they repeated their new breaching process. The door ended up leading to a bathroom. A richly-appointed bathroom, but an ordinary bathroom nonetheless.
“Makes sense there was movement from here if it’s the can,” Aaliyah said. “Let’s not linger; god knows what’s waiting around the next corner. We need to stay moving.”
They closed the door and continued following Eresthanon’s trail to the stairs. The stairway was wide with a broad landing at the switchback.
With her sensor marble stowed and her flashbang discs in hand, Aaliyah led the way up the stairs, moving as quietly but as quickly as she could to avoid being caught on the low ground. It ascended only a single storey.
Before they fully reached the summit, Aaliyah saw yet another staircase at the far end of the hall. Whoever had designed this townhouse apparently put a lot of emphasis on security through inconvenience; you had to cross the entire length of the house to get to a staircase leading to the next floor. In the end, that particular security feature hadn’t done these wizards a whole lot of good.
A large bay window framed the landing of the stairs across the hall, which had been broken outward by some tremendous force. Two more bodies lay crumpled not far from the foot of those stairs and the walls around the landing were scored and pitted by powerful magic.
Aaliyah lowered her stance until her knee rested on the floor at the very top of the staircase. It wasn’t an ideal position, but it might give them the drop on anyone barging out into the hall from any of the five evenly-spaced doors lining each side of the passage. She didn’t want to run that gauntlet or leave her flanks so egregiously exposed without some idea of what kind of movement had come through recently. Even then, it was a risk.
Eresthanon was crouching close at hand, a couple steps below her.
“The trail?” she asked, her voice quiet thanks to Eresthanon’s proximity.
“It continues through, but there was movement from the second door on the right, likely preceding the attack by as much as half an hour.”
The bathroom had been a bust and this movement was even older, but it was better to be safe than sorry when you had the luxury of choice. After deploying her trusty marble further down the hallway and flashing the door Eresthanon had indicated, they went through. It opened onto a short, narrow hallway that ended in still another door. A repeat of their rudimentary breaching process took them through that door and into a very unusual room, a library.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
An impressive library, to be sure, filled to the brim with shelves of books, cabinets of documents, and a number of handsome reading areas, but one that simply could not have fit in the townhouse. It was four storeys tall, just one less than the building housing it, but there was at least twenty feet between the door and the far wall. That was far too much space to have fit in the confines of less than half of a narrow townhouse on the Upper East Side.
“This is dimensional magic, right?” Aaliyah asked.
Eresthanon took a moment to consider. “I don’t believe so. One or both of us likely would have felt something from a compression of this magnitude.”
“If this ain’t magic,” Aaliyah said, stepping up to the rail to look down into the lower floors of the library, “then you know what that means, right?”
“Yes, Quaesitor; this unknown and seemingly hidden order of magi — in addition to possessing a library that would inspire envy in many venerated mystic societies — outright owns not one, but two townhouses less than a city block from Central Park.”
“Well yeah, obviously,” Aaliyah said. “But it also means twice as many places our intruders could be if they haven’t left already. After our initial sweep, we’re gonna need more manpower to do a full clear safely.”
There were plenty of nerdy types in the Vigiles who might lose their cool over a library like the one in this townhouse, but Aaliyah was not one of them. She was cool, obviously, but it never hurt to throw the eggheads a bone. Or a dusty tome, as the case may be.
With no immediate threats as far as she could see, she returned to the hallway to continue their pursuit of the unknown intruders.
They reached the base of the stairs in short order, giving them a better view of the two corpses and the damage to the landing. Like those below, the magi’s deaths were clearly the result of physical trauma. The remains were mangled, showing brutal, gruesome injuries more extreme than the earlier victims downstairs.
Up close, the cataclysmic damage to the walls and floor around the landing also showed signs that the conflict had escalated. Although the magic reinforcing the structure had largely held, the window had been blown out in spite of those enchantments.
When she glanced out through the shattered window, Aaliyah saw a lone man in firefighting gear perched atop a fire engine on the street below, watching the building. The large identification plate on the front of his helmet bore the glowing sigil of the scales and, unless Aaliyah’s eyes were crapping out on her, the markings of a member of the MRU. He tipped the brim of his helmet at her and she gave him a nod of acknowledgement.
“More MRU are on site,” she told Eresthanon, who was examining the damage to the walls. “And more probably on the way. I better send word not to breach without my word or good cause.”
While Aaliyah made the call to ensure no tactical goons came tromping in and contaminated her scene, Eresthanon continued his inspection of the damaged landing. Aaliyah had formed a preliminary picture of how this fight went in her mind, but she was interested in hearing the elf’s take. He had specialized knowledge of magic which, much as she hated to admit, was a bit of a gap in her own expertise.
“What’s your take on what happened here?” she asked when she’d finished conferring with the MRU.
“Lt. Rafferty was most likely correct; the sentinel wards picked up a disturbance through this broken window,” Eresthanon said. “I suspect the dead magi, in their increasing desperation, were responsible for breaking the glass, but it was a third magus who triggered the wards.”
Aaliyah’s eyebrows shot so far up her head they might’ve thought her edges had been talking shit. She had the same read on growing expenditures of magic power as the resident magi had become more desperate to protect their sanctum, except she thought the two dead magi had pushed the attacker to step up their beatdown game, explaining the severity of their injuries.
She was having trouble fitting a third magus into her visualization of the scene, especially without a body or some other clear sign of their presence. Then again, serious battle magic had been thrown around in this building and she’d be an idiot to let her pride get in the way of the job. She had to be the bigger woman, bite back her feelings, and find out what her new partner saw that she didn’t.
“Alright, walk me through it,” she said. “Tell me what your elf eyes see.”
Eresthanon cleared his throat. “By the time the intruder crested the stairs in the foyer, an alarm had been raised and the remaining defenders in the chantry were on alert. Judging by the spell damage, I would say the two victims at the base of the stairs represent a more elite security force than those on the ground floor. They met our intruder with an even fiercer resistance, likely using spells, artifacts, or potions that enhanced their bodies and allowed them to endure longer than their brethren who were slain first.
“In the course of their battle against the intruder, one or both of them unleashed magic that broke the window which, being glass, can only benefit so much from enchantments designed to increase their durability. Whether this magic posed a real danger to the intruder I cannot say with certainty, but it seems likely, which is why they renewed their attack with greater ferocity, resulting in the injuries we see before us.
“That is when the third magus enacted a spell of sacrifice.”
Although magic was not Aaliyah’s area of expertise, she recalled enough of her training from when she first joined this hidden world and from joining the Vigiles to recognize that phrase. Someone had turned themselves into a sorcerous suicide bomber, super-charging a devastating magic with their own life force. But if so, shouldn’t there have been some compelling evidence left behind? Had the elf missed something?
“Why aren’t there any bodies?” Aaliyah asked.
“The intruder survived and the remains of the magus were… redistributed,” Eresthanon said, gesturing around at the scorched and pitted walls.
Aaliyah took a moment to give those same walls a closer look. There was no viscera to be seen, but that meant very little if the arcane energies had been powerful enough. Come to think of it, it was not entirely impossible that a suicide spell could consume the very flesh of its caster to channel still more power into the magic. Now that would be a particularly grotesque bit of sorcery.
“Gross, but okay,” she said. “So why just one intruder, and what makes you think they survived?”
Eresthanon knelt on the floor and swept up more of the stone dust they had seen in the foyer, raising his hand to show Aaliyah. There was a significantly larger pile than he’d gotten from the carpet downstairs, but it looked otherwise identical.
“If their protective magic had been insufficient to survive the spell of sacrifice, I believe the stone would have shown signs of it,” Eresthanon said. “Whether it be a discoloration or damage to the fine particulates, there should have been some indication if the magic had been overwhelmed by a spell of such force.”
The elf brushed his hands free of the dust. “As for my reasoning on a single assailant, there have been two battles since the entrance foyer that involved multiple magi. In each, the evidence suggests their combined fire targeted a single point, rather than many. Until they were killed, of course.”
Aaliyah allowed herself a smile, pleased that her new partner had noticed the pattern of fire and equally satisfied he hadn’t included information from his tracking spell. He’d already shown that his spell couldn’t differentiate one person’s trail from another, so if he’d incorporated that in his reasoning on a single intruder it would have been a very poor deduction. Thankfully, Eresthanon was proving to have a capable analytical mind.
“I want to emphasize that the magic behind the stoneshield the intruder is using is surprisingly potent,” Eresthanon added. “I suspect the two of us could overwhelm their defense if it becomes necessary, but it will not be without its risks.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice, buddy,” Aaliyah said, smirking. “Anyway, let’s keep moving.”
She took one last look at the devastation around her, offered another nod to the MRU officer sitting on the fire truck outside, and continued on her way upstairs. She had some tricks up her sleeves the poor bastards who’d given their lives trying to protect this place didn’t have and they’d even the odds more than Eresthanon knew. Still, it would be better to play that sort of thing close to the chest until her working relationship with Eresthanon had solidified.
For now, they had to keep looking for this mysterious intruder. Hopefully they’d find some compelling evidence about the who and why of the assault, because the how was painting a picture Aaliyah really wanted to make sure was as clear as possible before she committed to a working theory on the crime.
The two vigilum left the destruction of the landing behind and made their way up to the fourth floor, in search of answers in this strange sanctum of sorcerers hidden in the heart of Manhattan.
They could only hope that clues awaited them above, and not more bloodshed.