Book 3, Chapter 54

The dims might not have understood what it meant to be rendered invisible and silent, but Nelgith and his partner mage were both giving me disconcerted looks. The mass versions of those two spells were significantly more expensive to maintain—though less so than casting ten individual invisibility spells, even ignoring the difficulty inherent to channeling that many spells at once—and I wasn’t pulling in ambient mana to power them. It was too expensive to hold indefinitely, so I must be doing something they didn’t understand.

Neither wasted any time asking questions, probably because they assumed they had seconds at best before the effect failed. That wasn’t true, of course. I could maintain the effect for an hour or two at minimum, so while they were all rushing forward, I was in no hurry, personally.

With their group being telepathically connected, it wasn’t necessary for them to talk to communicate, though I suspected Nelgith wouldn’t manage to hold that for much longer. I could already feel a noticeable difference in how much mana his core held. He knew better than to pull in mana right now, since that would give away his presence to the mage guarding the teleportation building, which meant he had nothing to rely on but his own mana generation.

The guard, or sentinel, as this group was calling the man, stood at attention in front of the entrance to the building, peering off into the darkness while maintaining a vision-enhancing invocation. His ability to sense mana was probably confusing him, because while I had no doubt that he could feel mana cores, it was much harder to separate them from the background mana suffusing the environment. His physical senses not showing him any cause for the anomalies in the mana left him unsure of what was going on.

That was until I attacked him. I’d already started interfering with the scrying wards on the building, though it was anyone’s guess whether the sentinel monitoring them would realize something was wrong. Even if they did, they wouldn’t know exactly what was happening, just that they’d been effectively blinded. That left the guard with only slim hope for reinforcements, and that would honestly be the worst-case scenario for him.

The best move the sentinel inside the building could make would be to retreat to the tower and sound an alert. I doubted they’d do that, though. My intrusion into the scrying ward was deliberately designed to mimic the interference ambient mana sometimes generated and would probably be dismissed as nothing if it was even noticed at all.

What it accomplished was to allow me to place a greater illusion of the door guard in his place even as I wrapped him in a cocoon of invisibility and pulled him directly into the sky where I was waiting for him. The sentinel’s eyes widened for just a moment before force magic slammed down on his head.

His reactive wards flared, but they weren’t up to the task of stopping an attack this strong. The force smash spell stuttered for a split second, then shattered the wards and continued into the sentinel’s skull. Blood spurted from his split scalp and he went limp, held upright only by the power of the telekinesis I’d grabbed him with.

He wasn’t dead, which was a turn better than he’d have been given if I hadn’t shown up, but he was out of the fight before it had even begun. I brought us both down to ground level and manipulated the man’s hands to grab the doors and throw them both open. This would alert the other sentinel that someone had entered, but not that the wards had been forced.

No sooner had the doors been opened than I felt the nine Breakers stream past me in two columns. They apparently knew their way about the interior of one of these buildings, which was more than I could say for myself. I let them go ahead while I dragged the unconscious sentinel inside and closed the doors behind us.

Part one was complete, and with considerably less noise than if the Breakers had gone with their original plan. The Breakers would find and subdue the second sentinel, hopefully without killing them, and I would sweep the building to make sure there were only two enemies here.

After confirming that, I bypassed the side rooms and went straight to where the platform was sitting in the middle of the building. It took almost the whole center room, a square thirty feet long on each side with a narrow strip of stone floor five feet wide surrounding it. The Breakers were already there, looming over a sandy-haired kid maybe eighteen years old. The kid was on his back, blood running down his face from where they’d managed to club him, but still breathing.

“So far, so good,” Nelgith said when he saw me walk in. “How sure are you that you can get this platform running without setting off the alarm?”

“We won’t know until I get a chance to look at things,” I said, “but if he could do it and he’s still alive, I’m confident I can trick the magic into thinking he activated the platform.”

“By all means then,” the mage said, gesturing toward the interface panel mounted near the door.

I’d seen hundreds of different designs for these interfaces, everything from complex patterns of lights that required specialized instruction to interpret to musical tones to illusory words to mental hook ups that dumped information directly into the user’s brain. This one was actually on the simpler side, though not one I had any personal experience in.

It was a series of three orbs, each one covered in runic script and placed on a pedestal with a curved top shaped to hold it. The center orb was designed to communicate with the destination platform. This was the one I’d need the sentinel’s help to override the security on, at least if I wanted to do it quickly. It had to send a signal to the recipient platform and receive confirmation back before the local platform would activate.

That might be a problem if the operators on the other side were wary, but I could already see a way to fake the confirmation signal to activate the platform, so I didn’t think it’d be an issue. The orb also contained the coordinates for the teleportation itself, which was what I was actually after. With those, I’d be able to teleport to the same location from anywhere, not just this platform.

It looked like the platforms came in pairs and could only transport people between them, rather than being a flexible network. I wasn’t sure if that was a lack of skill when designing them or a deliberate decision for security purposes, but it was damned annoying either way. It meant I’d have to raid each town’s platform building personally if I wanted to get more coordinates.

One of the other orbs was linked to the security of the building. Thanks to us using the unconscious guard to force the doors, we’d managed to avoid setting that one off. As far as anyone who might be monitoring anything was concerned, and that was a possibility since the rune patterns indicated a connection to an offsite location, things were just find here.

The final one was an operating orb for the platform itself that was designed to let me check on both the status of the platform’s mana reserves and, if necessary, lock it down to prevent teleportation to or from it. If I’d wanted to change the target destination from this platform, this was the place I’d do it, albeit with some difficulty since I’d have to literally smooth out and recarve the runes for the new target.

“Well?” Nelgith demanded after a few minutes. “Can you do it or not?”

“Hmm? Oh, yes, easily,” I said. “That was never in question. I’m just digging through everything to make sure there are no hidden alarms that might be triggered. There’s a list of thirty or so mages who are allowed to operate the platform, which includes our young friend here. It doesn’t look like anything special needs to be done for a normal teleportation, though I did find an alternate activating sequence that signals an alarm to the corresponding platform he could use if he was forced to transport someone under duress. We won’t be letting him activate that, of course.”

Excited murmurs came through the Breaker team. Considering seven of them were dims, that struck me as foolish. They were almost certainly going to die in whatever foolhardy attack this group of terrorists had cooked up. I supposed for the ones that lived, they might see some personal gain, assuming the Breakers followed through on their promises.

“How much time do we have left?” Nelgith asked his second.

“Ten minutes before we need to have broken away from the checkpoint at the other side,” the mage reported.

“We need to go, now,” Nelgith told me.

I considered whether I’d learned everything I could from this platform and decided that there was very little left for me to study. I’d need to hit other locations to fill in the gaps, and if I had to guess, I’d say any sort of access overrides I might learn here would be worthless at the other platforms since they’d be keyed specifically to this one. That’s what I would have done if I was as concerned about security as these people apparently were.

“Get him off the platform,” I said, nodding at the unconscious sentinel. “I need him over here to prevent any alarms from going off.”

Nelgith dragged the boy over himself and deposited him at my feet. “I know things started out tense, but if you’re ever interested in working with the Breakers, I’m sure we’d be happy to have someone with your kind of skills.”

“I don’t have a lot of stakes in your war against the children of light,” I said, “but I’m not above doing a little mercenary work if the price is right.”

“Here,” the mage said. He tapped a finger to his temple and said, “Read this location out of my mind. It’s a dead drop that gets checked frequently. Drop a meeting request there and someone will find you.”

I snatched the image of a street corner with a small store on it out of Nelgith’s head, studied it carefully to commit it to memory, and nodded. “I’ll consider it,” I told him. There was no telling what kind of obstacles I’d run into when I made my own entrance, so it was entirely possible that I could use the Breakers’ help.

The leader took his place back on the platform and I leaned down to haul the unconscious sentinel upright. “This is going to be a bit uncomfortable for you,” I muttered. “Good thing you won’t be awake to feel it.”

I ran a spell called mana puppet through him, then stretched his own mana out to the operating controls. A few seconds later, the platform activated and the Breakers vanished. I let the body slump back down to the ground and nodded to myself.

I’d given up my own element of surprise, but in exchange, I’d gained access to some potential new allies, plus I’d gotten what I wanted in terms of raw knowledge about how the platforms functioned. Security was going to be tighter when I hit the other locations, but that was always going to happen after the first one. Now that I’d gotten a good look at how the wards connected to the interface, I was confident I could suppress the alarms when I raided the next platform.

All in all, not a bad’s night work for what had started as an attempt to diffuse a hostile situation. Now I just needed to get a few hours of sleep before starting my sister on her morning exercises. Yawning, I flew through the night back to our hidden camp.