Keiran

Senica and Juby followed me into the greenhouse. I’d explained what I wanted, and not only had my sister agreed to help, she’d volunteered Juby’s assistance as well. When he’d tried to protest, it had only taken a single look from her to silence him. Perhaps if our parents hadn’t been there to witness the conversation, forcing Juby to be on his best behavior, he might have fought harder.

Regardless, he’d agreed to help and it wasn’t like I was asking him to do it for free. We’d agreed on a price in mana for each greenhouse, which the two of them could split however they chose. I hoped my sister wouldn’t sacrifice her own progress to prop him up, but if she chose to, that was her business. Juby was decent for his age, but he was no genius. He’d need all the mana I was paying and then some just trying to catch up to her.

“Alright, let’s get some tables in here,” I said. “Senica, if you would?”

She was more than familiar with how I set my greenhouses up, and stone shape was a basic tier spell, making this more of a test of her control in a discipline she didn’t much care for. Judging by the dirty look I got, she knew exactly what I was doing. With a sigh, she started pulling tables up out of the ground, shedding loose dirt as she drew on the raw material under the surface. After a moment’s hesitation, Juby joined her.

Between the two of them, they got the outer ring of tables done, though I made a mental note to go back through later and fix some of the uneven legs Juby had crafted. That was enough to tap them both out, however, prompting me to pull a small—relative to my limits—storage crystal out of my phantom space and toss it over.

Senica refilled her mana core completely and handed it to Juby, who did the same at a significantly slower rate. Then they got to work on the middle tables. Each one was more of a basin on legs, a square trough about a foot deep that would need to be filled with soil before we planted anything in them.

“Good work,” I told my sister when she finished. “Very smooth and even. Do you think you can repeat it on the other greenhouses while I do the initial enchanting here?”

“Depends on how long your storage crystal holds out,” she said.

“There’s more than enough for me to do it myself in there,” I said. “If it’s not enough for you to do the same, then I suppose some remedial transmutation lessons will be in your near future.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll get it done,” she said. “Give us an hour.”

If they kept burning through mana at the rate they were going, there was no way they’d get the work done before they ran out. Senica could probably do it by herself, but Juby wasn’t half as efficient. As the pair walked out, I sent a telepathic message to Senica and told her, ‘Take a bit to help Juby refine his technique before you get into it. His spell structure is bleeding at the linking runes.’

She nodded without turning her head and followed her boyfriend out into the night. I put the two of them out of my mind and started laying the enchantments the greenhouse needed to function. Spells to reinforce the glass were my first priority, followed by a series of sprinklers hooked into the framework that would draw from the town’s water supply. The river wasn’t anywhere near as close as I’d like, but I’d established water lines connecting to the houses years ago, so it wasn’t a huge task to simply add a few more buildings.

After that came the mana capturing enchantments to keep the interior ambient mana high enough to grow the things I needed, followed by the wards to keep everyone but Senica away. Almost reluctantly, I added Juby to them as well. My parents went on as a matter of safety. If something were to happen to anyone inside, I didn’t want there to be no one who could go in to help them.

When I finished my enchanting, I took a moment to reshape Juby’s work. Once it was up to my standards, I started pouring soil out of my phantom space to fill each table, then went to go fetch my new assistants so we could discuss what I needed them growing, how it should be tended, and what they’d need to do to process it once it was ready to harvest.

Then my scrying spell caught sight of them in Greenhouse Three and I immediately changed course to Greenhouse Two while cutting mana to the spell. I also made a mental note to use a hundred pounds of sand to scour the floor of Greenhouse Three later on. It was the only way to make sure it was truly clean…

* * *

With everything set up, it was time to return to Derro and claim my prize. More specifically, it was time to argue with Keeper about why I didn’t have her full payment and then sneak into the catacombs under the Actalus castle so I could start boring through the bedrock until I found this still theoretical buried mysteel infrastructure.

I teleported directly to Keeper’s warehouse, mostly because she’d warded it against exactly that and I thought it might help my position if I reminded her that there was a vast gulf between her abilities and mine.

“Agh!” she screeched when I appeared in front of her. “What’s wrong with you?! You almost gave me a heart attack.”

She’d been sitting at a desk positioned directly under a light enchantment, a dozen different books open in front of her and a loose sheet of paper she’d been scratching down notes into using a steel-nibbed pen enchanted with a connection to a nearby ink well to require no dipping. Upon my arrival, she abandoned her seat to clutch at her chest and glare daggers at me.

“Hello, Keeper,” I said, ignoring the outburst.

“Yes, yes, hello to you too,” she grumbled, sinking back into the chair she’d practically leapt out of. “Took you long enough. You have my payment?”

“Most of it,” I said. “I’ll need a bit longer to finish gathering the mana, but I’ve got enough for a few years of life extension already.”

I pulled three squat circular pillars, two feet tall and one foot wide, from my phantom space and dropped them to an open spot on the floor. They hadn’t been enchanted to reduce their weight or size, but each one still had thirty times as much mana as Keeper did.

“And the age reversal potions?”

I handed over what I’d been able to make, less than a third of what I owed her. We both looked down at the wooden rack when I put it on the table. It was only partially full of vials with murky brown liquid that looked like nothing so much as bottled muddy water. “I used up everything I had making those. I’ll make you another batch next month when I can renew my supplies.”

“That wasn’t our deal,” she said immediately, her tone turning ugly.

So much for her being cowed by my abilities.

“I am aware,” I told her. “This is what I have left. I thought I had more, but I don’t. There’s nothing I can do unless you have a secret herb garden for me to ransack.”

If looks could kill, my shield ward would be activating right now. “I want an extra year’s supply,” she said.

“That wasn’t part of the agreement.”

“Neither was getting my payment on an installment plan.”

She had me there. It really was my own fault for forgetting how low my own stores were. I’d gotten distracted preparing the genius loci ritual and no longer had Hyago keeping me supplied. I really did need to track him down sooner or later.

“Fine,” I told her. “One extra year, to be delivered within the next three months.”

“Good boy.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I am… significantly older than you.”

“Stop looking so young, then.”

“Oh no, I plan to enjoy my youth this time around.”

Keeper cocked her head to the side, perhaps sensing a story that wasn’t in her archives. “You had a difficult childhood as Keiran?”

“I did, and let’s just leave it at that.”

The wheels were turning in her head. She was going to be pestering me for first-hand stories about the time before the Age of Wonders again. I’d thought I’d broken her of this the first time she’d tried several years ago, but now she had information she knew I wanted, and she was exactly ruthless enough to leverage that for all she could get.

Damn. That was going to be annoying.

“Did we have any last-minute adjustments to our digging plans?” I asked, changing the subject in an attempt to derail her train of thought. I could tell it wasn’t working.

“None. Will you go in tonight?”

I shook my head. “Right now. No reason to delay it.”

“Maybe wait until night when most people are sleeping,” she said dryly.

“No need. I’m already scrying the catacombs and there’s nobody in there.”

“It’s not warded?” she asked. “No, what am I saying? It is, but not enough to stop you.”

“Now you’re catching on. I’ll be back tomorrow morning after I finish digging.”

“Very well. I have some work of my own to do,” Keeper said, eyeing up the row of potions on the table next to her and the storage crystals on the floor.

“Then I’ll leave you to it,” I said.

* * *

It was a frivolous waste to teleport directly into the catacombs, but I had the mana to spare. More importantly, I was still slowly refining my ability to cast lossless spells at the master tier. Since teleportation was one of my most used spells of that nature, it was the perfect one to practice with.

The catacombs were pitch-black, that absolute, oppressive, heavy darkness that only came from being deep underground where no sun or moons could reach. I conjured up a small globe of light to illuminate the area around me, mostly support pillars and arches that held up the castle above my head.

There was a cloying stink in the air, faint but unmistakable. This was a hole in the sand, stone, and dirt, a place to store the remains of the dead. If there’d been any ambient mana left in the world, I would have readied myself to face rogue undead.

For better or worse, that wasn’t going to happen here. Perhaps somewhere in Ammun’s tower, or if anyone stumbled into my petrified forest and buried the remains of a departed companion there, a zombie might arise. In the resting place of the Actalus line, it was an impossibility.

Though I doubted I’d see a guard, I sent a scrying spell to explore the halls above me. If someone did venture down here, I’d see them coming and overpower them. Until then, I started casting a powerful earth manipulation spell, one that would dig a hundred feet in a few minutes, though it would take considerably more time to open that hole enough to descend through. That wasn’t the goal, though.

Scrying through a thousand feet of dirt and stone was no easy feat, even for me. It was even worse when the composition wasn’t uniform, which made the most efficient method of getting a look down there the one I was currently using. The spell quested downward, shoving aside material and compacting it into the wall.

There were other spells that could dig far faster, of course. I’d once forced open a pit a thousand feet deep in an instant during my battle with Monarch, but using that here was not a good idea. Not only would it draw a lot of attention, there was every possibility it would drop the castle on my head. It wasn’t necessary, anyway.

Half an hour of digging revealed a pocket in the stone, large enough to suit my purposes. I teleported myself again, a short-range version that was both cheaper and faster to cast, then sealed off the hole I’d bored through the ground. This would be my new base of operations, if necessary, though it lacked some essential comforts, things like enough air to breathe. I’d come prepared for that, however.

Hopefully the rest of this expedition wouldn’t have such a hostile environment. I kept digging, determined to find the answer.