Book 2, Chapter 40

Blue Rat snapped a finger and pointed at the couch. “Map,” he said.

The book-reader, Myumi, sighed and stood up. I glanced at the book she left behind on a couch just to see the title, The Restless Duchess and the Errant Knight, and blinked. That… wasn’t a sword on the cover. Why would she be reading something like that in a room full of other people?!

Myumi opened up a cabinet to the side of the couch and rifled through for a moment before withdrawing a scroll. She plopped it in front of Blue Rat, then resumed her place on the couch and opened her book back up.

Blue Rat spread the scroll wide open and beckoned me closer. I could just barely see over the top of the desk and ended up levitating myself a foot into the air, causing the man in the back corner to shift slightly. Blue Rat leaned back in surprise, then laughed. “That’s a neat trick,” he said. “Must be helpful for reaching things on the top shelf.”

“It has its uses,” I said.

The city was drawn on the parchment, and in astonishing detail. Individual streets were labeled, as well as important buildings like the Reliquaries and enforcer towers. I saw a few other sections labeled with things like schools, hospitals, and something they called Water Control, which, judging from its position near a river at the west end of the city, probably had control over the city’s wells in some way.

The inner city, on the other hand, was a blank circle. Whatever went on in there, Blue Rat didn’t know any more about it than anyone else did. However, the map also included a set of pale yellow lines that, unless I completely missed my guess, were the city’s sewer tunnels. They ran underground like a jagged spider web, full of gaps and isolated sections.

I spotted three different lines that ran up to the wall, the closest of which was directly underneath a place called Flander Street, which ran directly north and south from a market square in the north district. It passed right under the Reliquary there, which would make it extremely easy to find with such obvious landmarks.

The map didn’t show a way into the sewer tunnels there, but that didn’t matter to me. I’d make my own entrance if I needed to. One small hole bored ten feet straight down would take almost no mana compared to the task of burrowing hundreds of feet underground, and was far less likely to be detected by any wards on the wall since I wouldn’t be using magic to dig directly beneath them.

Seemingly oblivious to the fact that he’d just given me exactly what I wanted, Blue Rat started pointing out various enforcer towers. “This one here first, tomorrow, and then in a few days, this one here. Depending how on well Grimkin’s boys react to the chaos, we might need you to take out a third one here.”

I ignored the towers he was pointing to and scanned the rest of the map for landmarks that would guide me to the other sewer tunnels running directly up to the inner wall, just in case the first one didn’t pan out for me. The one I’d used when I’d found Freak’s lab wasn’t on the map, proving that just because it only showed the three didn’t mean that’s all there was to be found. I’d investigate the information, but if it failed to lead to an easy way in, I wasn’t out of options.

The only question left in my mind was whether to go along with Blue Rat for now, then walk away once I was clear of the building, or if I should just kill him now and head off any future problems he might cause me. If I did kill him, I’d want to take care of the guard with the enchanted mask as well. I did not need someone like that hunting me down. Then I’d need to worry about some idiot trying to get revenge on me, which meant killing everyone in the room to eliminate witnesses and using a spell like shadow leap to leave the gang’s hideout without anyone seeing me.

I had the mana for it, but I’d be leaving myself vulnerable for at least the next day while I built my reserves back up. It still might have been worth it, but the more I thought about the whole bizarre scenario, the more certain I became that this was some sort of trap. No one who got to the point of controlling an entire section of the guild with a hundred people or more reporting to him could possibly be that stupid.

I’d told him what I wanted, and he was just giving it to me. On the surface, there was nothing preventing me from just walking away. Derro was a big city, at least in terms of sheer physical size, and I doubted Blue Rat’s men would be able to effectively search for me in some other gang’s territory. So what was the catch? It almost seemed like it had to be the masked man.

It seemed clear he was some sort of hidden defense against me. There was no other reason to act as confident as Blue Rat was right now when talking to a person he believed had killed two dozen adepts without getting caught. Nobody had so much as glanced in the masked man’s direction, which meant either they were all fantastic actors or that the enchantment was strong enough that it was working on everyone in the room except me.

“Keiran,” Blue Rat said.

“What?”

“Can you do this?”

“I can,” I said. “But I won’t. It’s way too much work for just a bit of information that you’re already giving me right now.”

“Call it a gesture of good will,” the gang leader said. “I know you could kill everyone in this room. There’s nothing any of us could do to stop you. Besides, how could I have known you’d want to know about tunnels under the wall before now?”

Because that little boy who’d been with Tanner knew what I’d named as my price, and he was working for Blue Rat now. The more I thought about, the more the whole conversation seemed staged. Everything was playing out a bit too conveniently for me.

Blue Rat’s attitude didn’t line up with his actions. He didn’t believe his own words. Was it because of his ‘secret’ bodyguard, or did he have another trick waiting for me? There could be some sort of mechanical trap I hadn’t spotted that he thought would riddle me with crossbow bolts or poisoned darts. Just because they’d fail utterly against me didn’t mean Blue Rat wouldn’t have faith in them.

On the other hand, a few people had tried to grab me and missed because of my shield ward. It was possible, but unlikely, that Blue Rat knew about it. I already knew the concept wasn’t unknown here. I’d collected belts inscribed with weaker versions of it from the mages who’d come to the village a few months back, and the presence of the masked man indicated Blue Rat had at least some access to magic.

“So the plan is to just… give me what I want and hope I go along with what’s frankly a ridiculous amount of work to repay you?”

“From what I’ve heard, you’re a man of your word. Er, so to speak.”

There were too many possibilities here and I didn’t have enough information to par them down. Blue Rat was obviously trying to run some kind of game on me, and I had a feeling if I tried to ignore him, he’d crop back up at the worst possible moment sometime down the line.

I estimated my reserves, good for about fifty seconds before I was completely tapped. I’d give myself ten, maybe fifteen. While I was constructing the spell, I asked, “And if I decide not to go along with this murder spree you’re planning on out?”

Mind read was a difficult and expensive spell, not one I would have attempted under normal circumstances. But with at least one person in the room who had some sensitivity to mana, I was limited to divinations and invocations if I wanted to be discreet.

‘Come on, kid. I just need proof that you’re the one who did the enforcers in. No fucking way am I taking this to Velvet if I don’t know for sure. Either agree to it, or walk away and fight your way through the sewer tunnels I marked for you. Either way, I’ll know what you’re made of.’

Velvet sounded like an assumed name. It reminded me of the nicknames Noctra and Iskara had used for each other, Nocturne and Perfidy. Even Freak had been an assumed name, and all three of them had been a member of the cabal I was actively hunting. Perhaps they were now hunting me in turn. That wasn’t surprising, nor was it hard to make a connection between someone slaughtering an entire base of enforcers and a powerful mage appearing in the same day.

“One tower,” I said. “And no more than 10 enforcers. Pick a smaller one that’s not staffed very well. We’ll do it tomorrow, and after that, I’m gone into one of those tunnels on my way to the inner city.”

There was no way in hell I was taking out another enforcer tower, but I’d learned what I needed to know from this meeting. The sewer tunnels were going to be well-guarded, which wasn’t a dealbreaker in and of itself, but I needed to figure out who this Velvet was and if I wanted to lure them to me through Blue Rat.

“Deal” the gang leader said, flashing me what he probably assumed was a charming grin. He jabbed a finger down at the map and said, “This one. Noon, tomorrow.”

I pretended to study the location for a moment, then nodded. “Blue Rat, if you try to screw me on this, I’ll make you regret it,” I said.

“Ha! As you say. You take out this tower for me, and I will get you a personal escort through the sewers. We know these tunnels. We know the dangers. We’ll get you through, safe on the other side.”

I didn’t need to read his mind to know he was lying. Everyone in the room probably knew, even the woman reading some sort of erotic fiction while her boss plotted to kill me. I had not missed dealing with situations like this. What I did miss was having so much mana that I could rip the entire story out of his head before killing him, then teleporting straight to this Velvet person and neutralizing them too.

Oh, I could still do it, but it would take me something like three months to build up the mana supply and I’d need a few extra mana crystals just as big as the one I was currently using to hold it all. I had a long way to go before I regained access to my old levels of power, let alone before I could use them casually when this kind of stuff came up.

I let myself be escorted out of the gang’s hideout and pretended not to notice the masked man following me. Once I was back on the streets, I started walking in the direction of the enforcer tower I’d agreed to take care of while I searched for what I needed. A few blocks later, I spotted it.

The combination of run-down enough to be unoccupied but still having ground level access was not common in Derro, but I spotted a building that looked like the back half had collapsed in on itself, taking the majority of the roof with it. That still left a room’s worth of space near the empty archway that marked the front door for me to work with.

I darted inside, still tracking my masked pursuer’s progress through the feel of his mana, and started winding my way through the piles of rubble until I was out of sight of the door. Then I sat down on a stone and waited to see if the man would follow me in.

He took longer than I thought to take the bait. After the third time he circled the building, I thought I might have to rethink my plan, but eventually, he must have decided I’d used a secret exit or something and came in to investigate. I pretended to be absorbed in the rough city map I’d drawn in the loose sand with my finger as a cover and waited for him to take up a discreet position out of the way of my exit, but which would allow him to still keep an eye on me.

A minute later, I stood up, destroyed my fake map by dragging my feet through it a few times to scuff up the sand, and walked past him. Just as I went by, I casually reached a hand out to discharge a paralyzing grasp spell into the man’s leg. To my surprise, he faded backward a step, avoiding the touch. Our eyes met, and his widened in shock.