Book 2, Chapter 20

Even blinded, I could feel the mana swimming around under the surface of the lake. And it was fast, far faster than I’d be able to move that row boat even if I were a grown man enhancing my muscles with an invocation. The light orb the monster had snatched out of the air had been high up, close to the ceiling even. Crawling over the open water with a spider climb spell was not appealing.

I was confident the monster wasn’t going to drag itself out of the water to come after me, if nothing else. Even if it did, I could tell that it was far, far too large to fit into the sewer tunnels. Retreat was very much an option, perhaps even the smartest option. I hadn’t expected to encounter this kind of natural hazard blocking my way. It shouldn’t be here, not in a desert city.

The sinkhole itself was plausible, but the fact that there was stone overhead meant that someone had done some work to seal it back up again. It obviously wasn’t a natural underground cavern, not considering the broken sewer tunnel running right into it. Given the size, I had to wonder at its origins.

I might very well be standing at the edge of a crater left by whatever cataclysm had scarred this entire island. It was certainly big enough, and deeper than I could discern just from standing here. How far down did it go? What else was swimming in there? For that matter, where had all the water come from? It wasn’t exactly rare in the wastelands, but this was an absurd amount to be collected in one place.

This lake was a mystery to be explored after I’d finished with the business that had brought me to Derro. For now, I only needed to find a way to get across it. Unbidden, Tanner’s words came to my mind. No light and no sound while in the sewers. It had seemed pointless back when he said it, but now I was starting to think that was because the boy was repeating things he’d heard without understanding the context. If the smugglers really were crossing this lake for every trip to the inner city, both of those stipulations seemed like excellent suggestions.

I’d made things more difficult for myself by ignoring Tanner’s instructions. It might be impossible to cross the lake unnoticed now that the monster had already been alerted by my light spell. It wasn’t diving back down to the depths either, choosing instead to swim laps up near the surface, probably hunting for more magic to devour.

How would I approach this problem if I were still an archmage? The simplest solution would be to teleport to where I wanted to be instead of walking. Alternatively, I could fly across the lake shrouded in magic that would hide my presence, defending myself and killing the monster if it became necessary. Another possibility was to use an offensive divination to assert mental dominancy over it.

All of those solutions ran into the same issue. They were costly. Flight was probably the cheapest in and of itself, but only if I discounted the extra mana I’d need to hide the spell. Actually, now that I thought of it, for the length of time I was likely to need to fly, an aura of untraceability would probably suffice. I would also need an aura of silence to mute the sound, as well as a spell of dark vision. Sharpened senses would not suffice down here where there was no light at all.

All of that would add up to five-to-six cores of mana a minute. How many minutes would it take to cross the lake? If I flew uninterrupted at maximum speed, probably only one or two, but that made a lot of assumptions. For all I knew, the cavern ceiling could drop low enough to touch the water in places, forcing me to navigate to find a space around them that had air. Besides that, maximum speed was meant for overland flight through the sky, not for blindly skimming across the surface of an underground lake. My shield ward would most likely be thoroughly tested if I tried that.

It also didn’t account for interference from the monsters living in the lake. I’d seen one behemoth creature already, but that didn’t mean it was alone in there. I was confident I could survive contact with it if the worst should come to pass, but as I studied my mana crystal and calculated my reserves, I became less sure.

The mana was there, but only just barely. If this thing caught me and managed to steal enough off me, I could end up stranded in the water. I needed this monster to settle down so I could confirm my route across the lake.

Or I needed to draw it away. That could work. It wouldn’t even take much mana, not if a simple light spell was all it took to get such a reaction from it. It might also help answer the question of whether the massive lake monster lived by itself or if it had friends.

I conjured up three new lights and sent them racing out across the surface of the lake in different directions. Immediately, I felt the mana moving under the surface change directions and swim unerringly toward the closest light. It was almost unnerving how calm the surface of the water remained as it traveled, silent and invisible to the naked eye.

I didn’t bother to watch the monster surface and snap up the mana this time. Instead, I cast a scrying spell in conjunction with aura of untraceability, which I hoped would give the magic the cover it needed to prevent it from being discovered. The goal was simple: find the fastest route across the lake.

In the meantime, the monster turned in a wide arc and shot off for the second of my three light spells. As a novice tier spell, light couldn’t really get all that far from the caster. I’d modified these three, tripling the mana cost but allowing them to move up to a thousand feet from me instead of a mere hundred.

They quickly reached their maximum range and I directed them to flee from the monster. In all likelihood, I could keep them out of its reach indefinitely, judging by the speed at which it swam. As long as I could successfully hide my own mana, and assuming I found the way to the far side of the lake clear of obstacles, this problem could be easily overcome.

Numerous smaller chunks of mana rose up from the depths in my senses, each one appearing one at a time. Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to do more than count numbers based on that sense, but considering the size factor inherit to the maximum amount of mana a single core could hold, it was probably safe to assume that other monsters did live in the lake, just not ones the size of that massive creature who’d shown up first.

The new monsters weren’t half as fast as the original one. They also seemed to want to avoid that particular monster, no doubt concerned about becoming its next meal. The scrying spell I had sweeping across the surface of the lake and rapidly draining my mana since I’d had to imbue it with dark vision seemed to be going unnoticed.

This was going to be expensive, but not prohibitively so. I couldn’t see myself taking this route again, so I’d have to make finding a place to hide or an alternate exit back out of the inner city a priority once I was through the other side. Hopefully I’d be able to tell what wards existed on the wall once I had the opportunity to examine it from the back side. It was simply too big for something like ward scanner to give me reliable results, but given what I’d seen of the skill levels of the mages living here, I expected there would be gaps in their defenses for me to exploit.

I had one last test to perform after I finished my scrying, which thankfully returned a clear field for me to fly across. There were some stalactites hanging down dangerously low on the eastern side of the lake, even a few that appeared to stab deep into the water, but as long as I stayed on the west side, I had a smooth shot to the far shore. I even found a little wooden dock with its own row boat over there.

Now, as long as my defenses were sufficient to keep me hidden from the monsters’ mana sense, I was in business. The fact that nothing had gone after my scrying sensor told me that I was most likely safe, but I wouldn’t like to be proven wrong when I was a thousand feet away from the shore. My whole crossing would take less than two minutes if nothing went wrong, not even half the time I wasted testing the senses of the lake’s denizens.

I used greater telekinesis to send a chunk of stone skimming out across the lake’s surface while I watched to see if anything would go after it. It had a tinge of mana to it, the remnant of my spell, but aura of untraceability was wrapped around that, the same thing I planned to do for myself. It would be better to know if the combination was going to fail now.

There were a few sources of mana that moved in the stone’s general direction, but nothing that went straight at it. It was probably just a coincidence. Whatever was living in that lake was aggressively chasing the two remaining light spells I had going, with a multitude of small ones going after one orb and the big one pursuing the other by itself. The few smaller monsters that had gone after the big one’s prey had quickly disappeared from my senses when they got close.

I couldn’t think of any other tests that didn’t involve dangling myself like bait to see if they’d take it, and that seemed pointless considering the time frame involved. I had a solid plan involving no less than five simultaneously channeled spells: flight, aura of silence, dark vision, aura of untraceability, and light.

It was expensive and convoluted, but I thought it had excellent odds of moving me to the opposite shore without wasting over a week’s worth of mana generation on a single teleportation spell. It would only be roughly two days’ worth instead. It wasn’t ideal, but it was relatively safe. At least, it was if I proceeded under the assumption that there were no other defenses I’d need to overcome. That seemed to be a generally safe bet, what with the mana-eating monsters in the lake and a warding field’s general inability to span huge open spaces.

I did have to wonder where exactly all the mana was coming from that kept these monsters alive, however. Perhaps there was an entire ecosystem deep under the water with plentiful resources for them to consume and grow. Somehow, I doubted it. If such a place existed, they wouldn’t be rushing to the surface to chase after a puny little ball of light. These creatures were half-starved. Or they were rabid.

That, like so many things, was a question for another day. I reviewed my course in my mind one last time, sent my enhanced light orbs out to their full range to drag every bit of mana I could sense in that water far away, summoned my staff from my phantom space, and began casting my spells. Aura of untraceability was the first, and cheapest, of them, followed swiftly by aura of silence, dark vision, and, finally, flight.

My feet lifted off the ground, my body angled forward, and with my staff gripped tightly in hand, I shot off into the darkness. It took me approximately three seconds to realize that, for whatever reason, the giant fish monster had sensed me. It had apparently just been playing around before, because it turned in place and started swimming after me. That wasn’t an issue, though. I was too fast and it was too far away to intercept my flight.

A second massive mana source appeared in the water at the bottom of my range and started rising fast.