Book 2, Chapter 43

Whoever set the traps around Freak’s lair wasn’t very good at it. They were enthusiastic, though – I’d give them that. After disarming the twelfth trap in the same tunnel, I had to wonder if it wasn’t some sort of strategy designed to waste an intruder’s time and try their patience.

Eventually, I made my way back to the former menagerie and collected my surveillance monitoring enchantment. It showed me two women crawling all over the place and apparently arguing with each other, but I didn’t take the time to actually listen to the conversation yet. That would come later when I was secure behind some wards of my own and not in a place that my enemy might conceivably return to for unrelated reasons and find me.

I didn’t have any other reason to stick around in Freak’s old lab. The mana I’d stolen from the various traps presumably laid out by the two bickering women who’d combed the area for clues had been more than enough to recover from flying across the lake and my various divinations, which meant it was time for the most dangerous part of my infiltration: first contact.

The exit I’d planned on using to get back up to the surface inside the wall was gone. I assumed the two women who’d investigated Freak’s lair had collapsed it upon discovery, but that was a minor hurdle. Earth sense gave me more than enough information to come up into a building, though it did take me several minutes to excavate my own tunnel, levitate up, and seal it behind me. I left a shallow skin of dirt only two feet deep on either end, hiding the tunnel from casual inspection, but still allowing me to retreat through it quickly if I needed to.

Finally, after all the setbacks and detours, I was inside the wall. I would need to be careful to avoid detection until I knew what I was dealing with, but I had a full mana crystal and probably several dozen more traps behind me that I could go drain if I ended up needing more. Short of the whole cabal coming down on my head, I was prepared to deal with any danger I might find.

I’d met plenty of mages who believed in the power of aggressive force, of storming an enemy stronghold, blowing up anything or anyone who got in their way, and battering down distractions or hinderances to their targets with sheer brutality. Some of them were even strong enough to get away with it, but most mages who thought like that eventually underestimated someone and paid the ultimate price.

That was why, when I finally made it beyond the inner wall, the first thing I did was sit in the cellar of the building I’d tunneled up to and scry my little heart out. This was no time to be stingy with mana, so I used ward-piercing scries, invisible scries, auditory scries, and tracing scries. That last one was targeted at the two women my surveillance enchantment had revealed to me, but unfortunately, they weren’t within the radius of the spell.

Despite that one particular failure, I learned quite a bit in the two hours I spent studying the interior of the city. First, I got a look at the enchantments and inscriptions on the inner wall. My paranoia was only partially justified. Whoever controlled that wall would have known if I’d tried to fly over it or pass through it. They even would have known if any new tunnels had appeared underneath, which was why all the sewer tunnels terminated there.

Somehow, they didn’t know about Freak’s smuggling tunnel. Or maybe they did, since he was part of the cabal that I assumed had control of the city, and they just ignored it up until his death. To be fair, the lake made for a formidable defense against anyone trying to cross with magic, and I expected the smugglers had been trained on a very precise protocol for crossing by rowboat without attracting the attention of the lake’s guardians.

Passing through the walls anywhere but the gates tagged the intruder with an enchantment designed to announce their presence to the associated scrying spells. I could have removed it, but it would have taken me about twenty minutes. If I’d brute-forced my way through the wall, it would have most likely resulted in a prolonged fight that ended with me retreating if I couldn’t get enough time to work on breaking the tracer enchantment.

However, now that I had a chance to observe the inscriptions on the back side of the wall and study exactly what the defenses were, I knew what I needed to do to bypass the alarms. It would be time-consuming and expensive, but if I absolutely had to, I could phase through the wall without anyone realizing it.

That was the good news, such as it was. The bad news was that the inner city was, as expected, home to the wealthiest families and rife with magic. Enforcers regularly patrolled the streets, ones that were far, far better equipped than their coworkers outside the wall. I couldn’t be sure just from my scrying alone, but I was betting the bracers they wore were enchanted with some sort of defensive magic, the storage crystals on their batons were twice as big, and the way their steps thudded against the ground made me think the boots were magic, too.

More important to me, the inner city was a lot like that district I’d run into in the west side of the outer city. People were well-dressed, clean, and healthy. There were no slums to skulk through, no orphans scrambling to survive. That wasn’t to say the streets were teeming with the wealthy elite and their servants, of course. Despite being significantly smaller than the outer city, the inner city could have easily supported ten times the number of people living there.

It seemed Derro’s center was only for those who had the magic or the money to hold a place there. It wasn’t exactly surprising, but it did mean that I’d have my work cut out for me if I wanted to blend in. It looked like my best option was going to be to wait for nightfall to start moving around. In the meantime, I had plenty of other options to explore. Unlike the outer city, it was worth it to spend mana learning the layout here.

When I was done with that, I turned to my surveillance enchantment and sat down to go over the whole thing. That would keep me occupied for a few hours.

* * *

The two women entered Freak’s menagerie three days after our battle. They were preceded by a pair of light orbs, one of which looked more like a fireball than a light orb, and the women quickly split up to investigate.

“Lot of blood over here,” the one with dark hair called out.

“Got some here, too,” the light-haired one said.

“So Freak’s pet monster collection fought somebody.”

“An intruder, though? Someone who was strong enough to win?” Light-hair said thoughtfully. “Who’d he piss off that bad?”

Dark-hair shrugged. “Probably abducted the wrong person’s kid for his experiments or something.”

“Well, I guess we’re all done here. You’ve got the case wrapped up tight,” Light-hair said acidly. “Let’s go tell Velvet so he’ll know how thorough we’ve been.”

There was that name again. Whoever Velvet was, he was important in the cabal’s hierarchy. If he wasn’t inner-circle material himself, he was at least the gateway to it. It wasn’t uncommon to have someone whose whole job it was to deal with the weaker cabal members so they weren’t constantly taking up the time of the ones at the very top.

The two snipped at each other for another minute until Light-hair started casting some sort of spell. Whatever she was doing, it took her almost twenty minutes of chanting to complete it. The whole time, Dark-hair paced back and forth, little flickers of fire jumping up from her fingers repeatedly.

I couldn’t see the mana structure itself, but I could make some educated guesses based on the cadence of the chant and the time frame involved in casting it. Lengthy cast times almost invariably indicated someone trying to cast a spell that was beyond what they were comfortable with. If I assumed both women were mages capable of using intermediate tier spells, that meant an advanced spell, most likely from the divination school.

I didn’t have to sit around for twenty minutes watching her work, thankfully. My own enchantment allowed me to view events at any speed or order I wanted, rather like flipping through a book to find the section I was looking to read. I simply skipped ahead a page at a time, skimmed a few words to confirm the spell was still ongoing, and eventually reached the point where Light-hair had finished.

“First of all,” she said to Dark-hair, “shut up.”

“Hah, preemptive ‘shut ups.’ What was I right about?”

“It was a kid.”

“Seriously? Whose kid? Who came to rescue them?”

“That’s the thing,” Light-hair said. “No one came to rescue him. He fought Freak himself. The whole section of time is choppy as hell – heavy mana interference. They were both slinging some serious magic, and the kid won. Freak is dead, and after he kicked it, the kid went around harvesting mana from everything else in the cages.”

My eyebrows shot up. A temporal scry, even a weak one, was not something I’d expected based on the caliber of mage I’d seen so far. But upon closer inspection, I realized I couldn’t credit Light-hair herself for it. There was a diviner’s third eye amplifying her focus with divination spells hidden under her hair, the golden chain just barely visible in some spots and the gem itself behind her bangs. I couldn’t even begin to imagine where she’d gotten something like that from. It was well beyond any tools I’d seen anyone else using around here.

“Where would someone like that even come from? Wait… you don’t think…”

“That village Nocturne got himself exiled to. Remember that one transmission spell they sent back, about the kid who was showing people mana-controlling exercises?”

“That doesn’t mean it’s the same kid,” Dark-hair argued.

“Pretty big coincidences. You know Velvet hates coincidences.”

“I heard it was some child mage who took out that enforcer tower on the east side of the city, too,” Dark-hair said.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky, and they’ll send Swarm and Monolith to deal with it,” Light-hair said.

“Maybe they’ll send Velvet to deal with it himself,” Dark-hair muttered. “Wouldn’t mind it one bit if that prick got his skull caved in.”

Dark-hair didn’t notice her companion’s eyes flashing with anger at that statement, but I caught it clear as day. Light-hair was close to Velvet in some way. If I captured either of them, Dark-hair would be the one to drag information out of. She’d give her boss up to save herself if it came down to it. I might even be able to turn her against the rest of the cabal if she realized it’d be aligning herself with the winning side.

“So, where’d the bodies go?” Dark-hair asked, still oblivious to Light-hair’s expression. With a moment of visible effort, the blonde woman smoothed her face out.

“Doesn’t really matter, does it? Come on, I want to see if I can figure out what all this kid stole from Freak’s plant collection. Maybe I can take a guess at what he’s trying to make and what he’s missing. Might give us a lead on where to look for him.”

“Spirits save me, I hope so,” Dark-hair said. “Last thing we need is to have to sort through every damn orphan kid in the city trying to find one particular boy.”

The two women left the menagerie, but the enchantment had tagged them now, and I could follow their progress as they finished investigating the destruction of Freak’s lab. The biggest surprise came when they discovered my theft of the mana battery. That prompted a new round of speculation, but nothing conclusive. My teleportation spell would also cause too much temporal static for them to get a good idea of how I’d left beyond that it had used a lot of magic.

It would have been better if nobody had gone to check on Freak at all, but this was an acceptable result. The cabal had learned more than I’d expected them to, but not enough that it would pose any sort of problem to continuing my work. Velvet remained my next target, and after I caught up with him, I’d see who his boss was.

Someone around here was going to be educated enough to tell me just exactly what had happened in my absence.