Beyond Fire's Grasp

This story is set thirty-five years before Mage Errant.

There are even more stories about magical fortresses than there are about magical bank vaults, but I’m not interested in magical fortresses. I am, however, interested in covert military facilities, but there are tragically fewer stories about those. Unfortunately, most of those stories are baseless conspiracy theories.

That’s the issue with covert bases— they work best when they’re actually covert. Most such bases are rumors at best, until they’re long abandoned.

Hasn’t stopped me from finding out about quite a few of them, though, both past and present.

In the far north, past the coast of Ithos, there lies a chain of sunken volcanoes, now extinct. In the submerged caldera of the largest, there lies the ruins of an Ithonian Empire military prison. When it was in use, there were no walls or prison bars— simply a bubble of water holding the sea overhead back. Any prisoner wanting to escape would have to swim up through hundreds of feet of lethally cold, monster infested water, then swim dozens of leagues to land. And, if a major prison break had ever been attempted, the mage guards could simply collapse the ward barriers holding the water back. History doesn’t record how or when the prison fell, but the how is easy enough to guess.

Before the kingdom of Ruhn fell to Havath, they had a notorious alchemical research facility in the southern Skyreach Range. It was a cube of glass and steel, levitated hundreds of feet in the air, suspended between several mountains. Below it was a salt flat valley with no drainage out to the rest of the world, and in the mountains around the facility were rigged to release massive rockfalls at a moment’s notice. If there were ever a breach in the lab, it would immediately be dropped into the valley below, then buried in tens of thousands of tons of stone, whatever horrific alchemical compounds released locked away forever. There was never a breach in the lab, but when Ruhn’s loss to Havath was assured, the royal family of Ruhn ordered the facility’s destruction anyway, to keep it out of the Dominion’s hands.

Ctesia has a school where they train their covert operatives, one said to lack any walls or doors, instead being built of pure illusion, that the price of admission is being able to find the school in the first place. That’s mostly fiction— the school absolutely has walls and doors, and students are carefully selected by the Ctesian government. It is, however, layered in more dream magic and other illusions than any other place I’ve ever heard of, and not even I know its exact location.

I know nearly as much about secretive military bases as I do about bank vaults— I’ve infiltrated plenty of both.

My name is Drysa of the Vault, and the Tsarnassan army hates me.

It’s not my fault that they hate me, though— they were, after all, the ones who kept hiring me to test the security of their bases. They should really blame themselves for their security failings, I was just the one to reveal them. Their resulting embarrassment was their problem, not mine.

So when one of the Tsarnassan Champions reached out to me to help resolve a situation at one of their research facilities, it was a rather large surprise.

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Kadden Wildfire was among the most boring Tsarnassan Champions in decades— he didn’t have any clever tricks, unusual strategies, or unique magical styles. He was just a plain old boring fire mage, with a boring fire mage name.

Admittedly, a fire mage powerful enough to level a small city singlehandedly, but still just a fire mage.

As always, these sorts of surprise jobs seemed to fall in the middle of my family time. In this case, a party for one of my nieces, celebrating her apprenticeship to a prominent enchanter in our neighborhood of Tsarnassus City. An enchanter notorious for his obsession with safe enchanting, who had lived to a healthy old age in a profession where countless enchanters gave themselves chronic illnesses with the horrible alchemical compounds they used, or just died in explosions.

I still would have preferred Lenca go into a less dangerous field- say, tying dozens of swords to herself and then jumping off of cliffs— but it could have been worse.

I’m the only non-gorgon in my family, so I was the last to see Kadden approaching us on the public balcony we’d rented— even the shortest of my sisters’ children had well over a foot in height over me, these days.

When I did spot Kadden, I immediately weakened my restrictor tattoo to let my gold affinity sense roll out across the party. I noticed immediately that the Champion wasn’t carrying any gold on him, though his attendants carried plenty. I frowned at that— it didn’t speak well of Kadden’s character that he would make his attendants carry out any transactions, as though mere commerce was beneath him.

Kadden started to greet me, but I interrupted him immediately.

“Double.”

“I beg your pardon?” Kadden asked.

“You want to hire me for a job during my family time, you need to pay double my usual rate. Assuming, of course, that you’ve gotten permission from bank headquarters to take me off their schedule temporarily.”

Kadden narrowed his eyes at me irritably, obviously bothered at the lack of respect, but to my surprise, just nodded. “As blunt and straight to the point as I was told, I see. Fine. Double it is. We need to get moving now, though— we have less than an hour to make it to the site.”

He turned and walked off, clearly expecting me to simply follow, and my frown turned into a scowl.

Stones, I should have asked for triple.

--------------------------------

I knew this job was unusual the instant Kadden ordered me to leave my tracker with my family, and as the gryphon squadron carrying us left Tsarnassus City behind, heading north along the seacliffs, my suspicions bloomed.

“We’re heading to the Valves, aren’t we?” I shouted over the wind.

Kadden turned back to glare at me, but didn’t answer, and I nodded in satisfaction at the essential confirmation.

I’d never been to the Valves, but there were plenty of rumors about them among my fellow Children of the Vault, especially those who worked in the field of bank security like me. The Valves had some other official name, most likely, but I’d never heard them called anything else. I was excited to see whether the rumors about them were true.

The gryphon squadron pushed their gryphons to their limits, but even with their wind magic we barely made it to the Valves before the hour deadline. 

It made me miss my dead friend Edsen again— even before he’d become a Thunderbringer, he’d been an astonishingly fast flier. He likely could have made this trip in half the time.

I shook off the moment of mawkish nostalgia quickly— it was already tough enough being a middle-aged woman in the security business, best to avoid any reputation of sentimentality.

When we arrived at the Valves, we didn’t stop— instead, the entire gryphon squadron dived straight at the cliff, right above the low-tide line.

Several of the gryphon warlocks were not-so subtly watching me, waiting for me to flinch or even panic as we headed straight for a patch of blank stone, but I didn’t give them the satisfaction as we passed through the illusion of stone covering the cliff mouth. 

We found ourselves in an immense tunnel, wide enough for the elephant-sized gryphons to fly single file, though not large enough for a dragon or sphinx.

The tunnel immediately dipped down, then up, then down again, in a precisely measured series of curves. 

There were also numerous side tunnels looping away from the main tunnel, then rejoining it farther along, many of which were sealed by immense metal hatches.

The whole warren of tunnels was the frankly brilliant defense I’d heard rumors of, the one the whole facility was named after— the Valves.

The tunnels were designed to flood, and by opening and shutting specific side tunnels, the facility could control how extensive the flooding was, drowning and crushing invaders in flash floods.

Of course, regardless of how far the tunnels were or were not flooded, they were only accessible to air breathers at low tides, thanks to the tunnel mouth being constructed so far down on the cliffs.

The sheer power of the currents, not to mention the large number of water mages stationed within the Valves, were more than enough deterrent for any water breathers that stumbled across the hidden facility.

Water had already resumed running along the tunnels by the time we reached the entrance into the facility proper. There were a series of huge airlocks to allow entry, ones that I had no doubt could be flooded at will to deal with any problematic guests, but after a long, uncomfortable wait, we were allowed inside the inner airlock.

As the immense steel door rolled shut behind us, I took a deep breath.

No matter what happened, I wasn’t leaving this facility until the next low tide, at the earliest.

--------------------------------

“Alright,” I told Kadden. “It’s about time you told me exactly what’s going on.”

“We’ve had a theft,” Kadden said, leaning back in the chair in his office in the Valves. “We need you to figure out how the theft was accomplished.”

“Theft of what?” I asked.

“That’s none of your concern,” the Champion snapped.

I raised an eyebrow at that. “The nature of the stolen object seems to matter rather a lot. The means used to steal a live creature are quite different than those used to steal dangerous alchemical compounds or enchanted weapons.”

Kadden scowled further, and began drumming his fingers in thought on his desk.

While he did so, I took the opportunity to examine his office in a bit more detail.

I needn’t have bothered. There was, quite literally, nothing of interest or personal significance in there. The office was utterly blank of personality or adornment. Even all the papers and parchments that usually filled an office were carefully locked away inside sturdy desk drawers with enchanted locks.

The rest of the facility was much the same. Blank stone walls, steel and wood furniture.

“It was a cube of solid material slightly smaller than a human fist,” Kadden finally said.

“Living material?”

“No.”

“Enchanted?”

“No. Quit asking.”

Now that was fascinating.

“And you want me to figure out how to prevent it from being stolen again?” I asked.

“No. I want you to figure out how it was stolen, to try and help us figure out who stole it.”

I raised both eyebrows at that. “The cube hasn’t been retrieved yet?”

Kadden shook his head. “No, it hasn’t. It’s still here in the facility, in fact. No one has left or will leave until the cube is found.”

I gave him a flat look. “You never mentioned anything about that before I entered.”

Kadden didn’t bother to respond, just stared back at me flatly.

I definitely should have asked for triple.

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Designing secure covert facilities is an art of its own.

There’s some areas where that tradition overlaps with bank vault design, other areas where it veers off into wildly different directions, but the ultimate goal is the same— control the flow of people and objects in and out of a space.

The biggest difference between a bank vault and a secure military facility?

Personnel. Covert military facilities are built to only allow military personnel and a few rare outsiders like myself in, while bank vaults frequently have outsiders allowed in, and for that matter, much closer to the vault itself.

All the military personnel in the Valves functioned as an additional layer of security over what a bank vault would have, but right now, all of them were suspects, save for myself, Kadden, and the gryphon squadron that had delivered us here.

After my thoroughly unsatisfying briefing from Kadden, he turned me over to one of the researchers to take me to the vault the mysterious cube had been stolen from. Said researcher was a tall, nervous, bald woman, who clearly worked as an alchemist, based on her clothing, shaved head, and cautious movements.

She’d been forbidden from telling me her name, or even discussing anything but the theft itself, so I didn’t bother trying to get to know her. I wasn’t here to figure out the culprit, I was just here to figure out the means.

Kadden did mention that she wasn’t a suspect— about a third of the tungsten researchers had solid alibis during the hours when the theft had occurred.

The vault in question was more of a safe, one that had been built solely to hide the mysterious cube. It was the size of my torso, with the hollow space in the center perhaps the size of my head. It was sealed by several enchantments, and could only be opened by two authorized mages wielding the correct enchanted keys simultaneously.

Said safe was hidden in another, larger vault, made of enchanted stone and lead, big enough to walk inside.

The whole setup was loaded with so many enchantments that I suspected it was barely this side of triggering a resonance cascade. There were, bizarrely, no wards I could detect on the safe or the vault that contained it.

The double vault was a technically competent, albeit deeply unimaginative defense, as though the military had used up all their imagination designing the Valves, but that was… fine. The fact that the double vault was hidden inside the Valves was its primary defense, with the military members patrolling its halls its secondary defense. It existed only as a tertiary defense.

And, after a couple hours of examination, I realized something very important about that tertiary defense.

It hadn’t failed.

Whoever had stolen the mysterious cube that had gone missing? They’d opened the safe the correct way, without breaking into the vault at all. There was no damage to the enchantments, nothing.

When I relayed this information to the bald alchemist escorting me, I got a reaction I hadn’t been expecting.

She burst into tears.

-----------------------------

Once the bald alchemist calmed down, I got an explanation that I absolutely hated.

Each and every person authorized to use the safe had already been investigated and cleared of any wrongdoing— they all had foolproof alibis during the time of the theft. 

So, thanks to that, the entire facility remained on lockdown— no one was leaving until the material sample was recovered.

What was infinitely worse?

There was a countdown.

If the cube wasn’t recovered in the next day, Kadden Wildfire was going to incinerate the entire wing of the facility where the tungsten had been stored, and all the researchers in it. And then, if need be, he was going to incinerate the whole facility itself.

----------------------------------

The Tsarnassan Champion stared at me expressionlessly as I ranted, until I stopped to catch my breath.

“You were not informed of the deadline because you aren’t at risk,” Kadden said flatly. “You and the griffin squadron will survive. The squadron because they’re being strictly quarantined from anyone else stationed at this base, you because it’s so improbable you could be involved.”

“You’re just going to incinerate everyone else, then?” I demanded. “Just, what, to discourage future thefts? Even though you’re already convinced many of them are innocent?”

Kadden shook his head. “No, to recover the sample. It has a higher melting point than any other known metal, I’d struggle to melt it even if I tried. It will be the only part of the base intact when I’m done. As for the non-suspects… we simply don’t have the time to absolutely confirm they weren’t involved. The longer we go without recovering the cube, the higher the odds of it being smuggled out of the facility to one of our enemies.”

I raised my brows at that— no wonder they were so frantic to recover this mysterious metal.

Just knowing it was metal helped considerably in planning.

“If I can help you recover the cube before the deadline, you won’t have to burn down the facility, though,” I offered.

“You were hired to inspect the safe, and you have done so,” Kadden said flatly.

I rolled my eyes. “I’m a resource, don’t waste me. Besides, I can’t imagine you’re pleased at the idea of losing an entire facility and all these personnel. I can help.”

Kadden drummed his fingers on his desk and stared at me as he considered, then nodded curtly. “Fine. What do you need?”

I cracked my neck, then made four requests.

----------------------

The first thing I did was request a dossier on the material properties of this mysterious metal.

They called it tungsten, and along with its absurd heat capacity, it was heavier than lead, somewhat brittle, and generally aggravating to work with. 

And, worst of all, none of my usual methods are going to work.

This tungsten stuff is even less reactive than gold.

It’s entirely immune to acids and bases, and is inert to just about any alchemical reagent I could think of. The few alchemical reactions I could think of that might work are non-starters— flooding the facility with dangerous gases at high temperatures rather defeats my purposes.

For all my knowledge of alchemy, I wasn’t going to be using it to detect the tungsten cube, not in the limited time we had left.

That’s where my second request came in.

----------------------------

I’d never once encountered a bank or military facility that lacked meeting rooms and auditoriums, regardless of whether the facility needed them, and the Valves was no exception. 

The number of researchers qualified to work with this tungsten stuff— twenty-seven— was too large to fit into a meeting room, but just small enough to seem pathetic, all clustered together in the front of an auditorium.

One or two of the researchers sat farther back, away from the group, but their efforts to seem iconoclastic loners was laughable, with the great stretch of auditorium still behind them.

This was my second request— to gather all the tungsten researchers into one room. Not all of them were suspects, but this would go best if they were all here.

“We’re going to play a little game,” I announced. “It’s called ‘you’re all going to die unless you brainstorm a way to find the tungsten.’”

“I thought we were all suspects,” one of the researchers, a man with glowing white spellform tattoos running along his face like sideburns.

“You are suspects, Sideburns,” I said, pumping mana into my restrictor tattoo idly to deactivate it. There was just as little gold nearby as ever, but it didn’t particularly matter— I was just alleviating my boredom while the researchers convinced themselves to help her.

“My name isn’t Sideburns.”

“Well, I’m not allowed to know your names, am I? And does anyone disagree about his tattoos looking like sideburns?”

“They’re supposed to be insect mandibles,” the researcher snapped.

“Is this really what you want to spend your last hours of life arguing about, Sideburns?” another researcher asked him. The bald crybaby who’d escorted me before, in fact.

There were general chuckles at that, then one of the wannabe mavericks sitting away from the group leaned forwards. “This is all pointless. Everyone in the facility already knows what’s going to happen, and yet they’re not coming forward. They either don’t care about us or themselves dying, or they have some way out.”

“Or Kadden stole it,” someone muttered.

The whole room went awkwardly silent at that. If the great power was behind this, had ordered the theft, there was nothing they could do to escape their fates, and no practical way to bring him to justice.

“You’d best hope he isn’t,” I said. “But we’re not here to solve the mystery— just to find the tungsten.”

“How can you trust us to help, if we’re suspects?” a particularly burly researcher asked. I’d wager good gold that he was a healer— there was always a subset of healers that used their magic to shorten recovery times between their workouts, and make themselves absurdly, prodigiously muscular.

It was a silly preoccupation, but I had a soft spot for silly preoccupations. Life couldn’t be all work all the time.

“Good question, Muscles!” I said. 

He took his new nickname with good cheer, and flexed to show off.

I chuckled, then continued. “Easy— we’re going to play a game of peer review. It’s your job to propose and shred plans to find the tungsten. We’ll start off with an easy one that I already know won’t work, just to practice— detection wards.”

“Why wouldn’t they work?” Sideburns demanded. “It’s basic protocol in most facilities.”

“We’ve got no idea how to build tungsten detection wards, that’s why,” another researcher snapped back. “We’ve only had the sample for, what, six months? Not nearly enough time to design material-specific spellforms.”

“No, but there’s nothing stopping us from designing property-specific spellforms. There’s hardly going to be anything else in the facility that shares its material properties. Just sweep for the right combinations of density and ductility and such, and…”

The group descended into bickering, and I sighed heavily. I gave them their head to argue, though.

Detection wards were a bad solution for this sort of job, even if they had been possible. They were best used to watch for contraband at a chokepoint, like entrances or exits. Mobile detection wards were hard to build, inefficient, and unreliable. None of that was the reason they wouldn’t work, though.

I let the debate go on a few more minutes, then whistled loud enough to get everyone’s attention.

“Detection wards won’t work for a much more obvious reason, one that has nothing to do with tungsten,” I said. “It’s because you can’t build wards in the Valves. It’s why there were no wards on the tungsten’s safe.”

“Of course you can,” Muscles said. “There are wards everywhere in here. Wards between the residences and research halls, wards around high-energy experiments, wards built into the outer walls, wards…”

He trailed off, and looks of dawning realization crossed the faces of the other researchers as well.

“We’re at maximum ward density,” the Crybaby said. I should probably think of a better nickname for her, that one was a bit cruel. Her only other distinguishing feature was her baldness, though, and that applied to half the other researchers in the room. 

“The Valves is at maximum ward density,” I agreed. “It was pretty obvious after I examined the safe, and Kadden confirmed it. And thanks to that, maintaining the current wards is a delicate balancing act, and it would take days to pull down enough to use detection wards. Time the Champion feels we can’t afford.”

Wards were some of the most useful magic in security work, but they had quite a few limitations— most specifically, that there was a maximum number of them that could fit into any spatial area. Trying to go over those amounts would lead to wards failing, or even exploding if they were poorly designed. Which these weren’t, but as Muscles had pointed out, many of the wards in use contained high-energy experiments, as well as reinforcing the outer walls. The results of them falling would be catastrophic.

“So,” I said, clapping my hands. “You all get the format now. Anyone else have a proposal?”
------------------------------

The proposals came one after another after that, and it was a struggle to keep up with them.

The most common solutions were alchemical, but one by one, they kept running into the same problems I’d discovered when trying to think of my own plan— tungsten was just too extreme of a material for any alchemical tracking means. Anything that could react with it— that we knew of— would likely do just as good of a job destroying the environment around it as Kadden would burning down the Valves.

It would be lovely if there were some harmless gas that reacted with sparks against tungsten, but nothing of the sort had been discovered yet. Maybe it was out there, but with a material this new…

We still spent hours brainstorming alchemical solutions, seeking new delivery methods and the like, to no avail. None of us left the auditorium, save to use the toilets adjacent to it. Guards and locked doors made sure of that.

A few proposals for enchantment-based solutions were offered, but half-heartedly— enchantments took weeks or even months to craft, depending on the alchemical reagents used, and the extreme care necessary. 

With ward-based solutions out of the question as well, the conversation slowly shifted towards spell-based solutions— which is where things got interesting. 

I started to get a grasp of the sheer number of affinities present in the room— the researchers had gotten engrossed enough in the argument that they were letting clues slip— and the variety was absolutely astonishing.  There weren’t just the usual affinities you’d find among magical researchers, alchemists, and enchanters— water, air, heat, acids, bases, various metals, and the like— but a staggering array of deeply esoteric affinities. 

Muscles wasn’t just a healer, but had an affinity for the pressure applied to containers holding a vacuum, which was bizarre. It was the closest I could think of to a vacuum affinity, which was completely impossible, so far as anyone could tell. How could you have an affinity for nothing? But an affinity for the forces that rise up around nothing? I’d never even imagined it, but there it was.

Other researchers had affinities for highly specific metal alloys, or even more specific chemical reactions, and the creative magical solutions they were offering grew more and more elaborate. The sense of desperation in the room slowly began to recede as the mages sunk their intellects into the problem.

The best solution came from a trio of sound mages, who laid out a plan for sonic mapping of the facility— if they sent sound waves through the whole facility, the sound that would bounce back would be unlike anything else.

It would be painful and deafening for any non-sound mages in the Valves, but better miserable than dead.

Unfortunately, the plan ran into a fatal flaw— sound magic was brutal on wards. Using enough sound waves to cover the facility would wreak havoc on the various wards, and it was entirely possible they’d collapse many of them.

Quite a few of the researchers involved tried to find solutions to that roadblock, but after half an hour of debate, the idea finally died.

The next idea, one involving using gradual heat shifts to map material heat capacity of materials across the entire facility, was a promising one. It would be slow, and take several days, but given how solid the method seemed, I might be able to persuade Kadden to take that time.

Before we could really dive into that method, though, two of the researchers in the room slipped quietly to sleep, no one around them even noticing at first. Before they could, Kadden himself entered the room and gave me a slow nod.

I sighed in relief, cracked my neck, and flopped down into the chair onstage. “Alright, we’re done. The cube’s been found, folks.”

There was widespread bafflement and confusion, but I just ignored the questions as guards entered to seize the two sleeping culprits.

--------------------------------

I’d made four requests when I’d spoken with Kadden.

The first I’ve already mentioned- I asked for the dossier on tungsten’s properties.

The second I’d also mentioned— gathering all the tungsten researchers together.

It had never been more than a ruse, though. 

I mean, there had been a slim chance that they could have solved the mystery, and that heat capacitance plan might have actually worked, but we’d never know now. No, we’d gathered the tungsten researchers together to keep them out of the way while Kadden and his men carried out the third and fourth requests. I’d been literally nothing but a distraction, a slight of hand to keep the traitors from triggering their plans.

The third request was a simple but time-consuming one— to investigate, instead of those who potentially could have removed the cube, the two mages who had returned it to the vault, ones that had previously had alibis for the supposed time of the theft.

It was one of the oldest heist plans in the book— rather than come up with some elaborate vault-breaking technique that left no traces, just never put the item in the vault to start with. 

It had taken a few hours of work, but by following the footsteps of the mages who had supposedly returned the cube last, it had been discovered tucked away in some lab or other. The details were, of course, denied to me— I had no need to know exactly what they were working on in there.

There were, in fact, countless details about the case I’d never know. I had no idea who exactly the two researchers were— they weren’t even among those that I’d nicknamed. I’d never know who they were working with, whether Havath, Alikea, or someone else. Nor would I know what their motives had been. Maybe they’d been bribed, maybe they’d been blackmailed, maybe they’d had relatives kidnapped for the purposes of extortion. I didn’t even know what magic they’d used to put the perpetrators to sleep in the audience hall.

I did, however, know how they’d intended to escape with the cube, however.

Via wards.

It had occurred to me when Kadden had confirmed the high ward density of the Valves— the dangerously high density, in fact. My fourth request? It had been to search the entire facility for unauthorized wards. Kadden had been grateful enough to confirm what they’d discovered in the search, out of gratitude.

Their plan was simple enough— bring the cube into the massively overbuilt protective ward they’d built, then activate it. That, in turn, would have pushed the ward density in the facility over the maximum, and caused the collapse of many other wards. Which would, most likely, have released high-energy experiments in the form of huge explosions. Not to mention floods of incredibly caustic alchemical reagents.

That, in turn, probably would have been enough to damage the base structurally, and let seawater flood in, destroying the whole base, save for the protective ward the traitors would be hiding in.

Or maybe the protective ward would have just brought down the wards in the walls first, but that would have probably brought the seawater in regardless, for the same results.

Presumably there was some means their employers had devised to retrieve the traitors and the cube— or at least the cube, the traitors would likely be a liability. Again, something I’d never know.

There would absolutely be changes in how Tsarnassan covert facilities would operate in the future, and Kadden had already requested a report and suggestions from me on the use of security wards in them— something I’d be further compensated for. 

------------------------------

I spent a lot of time thinking about the tungsten after I left the Valves at the next low tide after the cube was recovered, considering various uses for the strange material.

There were a lot, to say the least. 

I spent a while fantasizing about using tungsten siege spells to take down some of the nastier rogue great powers out there, particularly Dorsas Ine. Its insanely high melting point and high density made the metal an effective weapon against the Gold Phoenix.

Ultimately, though, those were some of the most boring uses I could imagine for the substance.

The actually interesting uses I could imagine?

Mostly lay in enchantment.

Tungsten’s high melting point, in combination with its impressive ductility? It meant you could craft spellforms out of tungsten wire that would operate at high temperatures, enabling certain compact high-energy enchantments that were previously impossible, save at much larger sizes. Nothing truly revolutionary, perhaps, but absolutely the sort of thing nations and great powers would gladly sacrifice huge numbers of lives over.

Even over my own professional pride at a job well done, I was happy that I had circumvented those sacrifices this time.

---------------------------------

There was, of course, one more notable aspect of the case I should mention.

Namely, my pay.

When I received it, it wasn’t double as I’d requested, nor triple as I’d hoped.

Kadden had quadrupled it. 

I wasn’t about to complain.