Keiran

Most of the facility was underground, with only a few silos breaking through the dirt to squat amongst the rolling hills that made up the area. That did make it a bit harder to break in unnoticed, or at least it might have if I hadn’t stolen the knowledge of the site’s unloading grounds from the supply train.

It was an impressive—and wasteful—use of mana. Rather than unload the carts or let anybody into the facility, everything was parked in a single barn, one that was about five hundred feet long. The horses were unhitched and the team rode them back out of the site. What happened from there was outside the knowledge of anyone I’d scanned, but it was easy to see once I got there.

Everything, wagons and all, were teleported five hundred feet straight down. Why they needed the wagons was a mystery to me, but teleporting supplies over such a short distance in the name of security was ridiculously wasteful. Just what were they building down here that they thought it was worth that?

Much like the Sanctum of Light itself, the teleportation effect was all sorts of warded against tampering. Unlike the tower’s platforms, this one had no key to allow unrestricted access through. Every single spell was manually cast using the barn’s framework as part of the spell. It was entirely possible that I could sneak myself into the spell without anyone realizing, but far less likely that I could force a teleportation down to the facility itself.

There was always the option to dig my way down there, but if they were this paranoid about just bringing in supplies, I didn’t believe for a second that there wouldn’t be wards to detect any tunneling. Even the ground above the facility was seeded with alarm wards to detect anyone moving around there. If I so much as landed on the grass, someone in that underground bunker would know about it.

An enormous amount of mana was going into this project, even on the scale Ammun’s tower produced it at. The more I found out, the curiouser I grew, and right now, I was only seeing around the outside edges of things. I needed to find a way into that facility, hopefully without anyone realizing I’d done it.

Worst case scenario, I’d come back in a few days when the supply train got close and execute my plan to hitch a ride on the teleportation as some unintended luggage. That would require waiting, however, and, worse, it would bring me in at the moment when security was at its highest. It wasn’t ideal.

Luck was on my side. It took a bit of investigating, but I eventually found what I was looking for. Humans needed air to breathe, and one of the major hurdles of an underground fortress was keeping enough clean air coming in that its occupants didn’t start to pass out. It was entirely possible to recycle that air with magic, but it wasn’t easy or cheap.

Given how much mana this place had wasted on their insane security measures, I’d despaired of finding any sort of chimney. If they were willing to teleport their supplies a few hundred feet, there was no reason to think they’d balk at the expense of air scrubbing enchantments.

And yet, there it was: a small tube of stone, perhaps six inches across and hidden inside a nest of overgrown bushes tangled together. Even with as diligently as I’d been searching, I might have missed it but for one fact. A thin curl of smoke rose from its depths and broke apart on the branches around it, but my magic still picked up the scent.

I sent a divination down it to check for wards and found a few down near the base, but I was confident I could get through those. All I needed to do now was cast an elemental form spell to turn myself into living air and slide down the pipe.

There were numerous screens made of fine razor-edged mesh wires that would have shredded any monsters attempting to descend the vent, but which did nothing to slow me down. I swirled downwards, the smoke mingling with my body as I went, and stopped when I got to the first ward. It was a simple insect repellent, a standard precaution in any sort of chimney. The only surprising thing was that it was so far down from the mouth of the pipe.

When I considered it, though, there was something else unusual. In facilities like this, all the wards were connected to a ward stone so that they couldn’t be overpowered one at a time, and so that if one of them was broken or tampered with, an alarm ward monitoring the stone itself could sound. This ward stood alone.

That made it pathetically easy to defeat simply by draining its mana and letting it unravel. I could have done as much when I was three years old. Even better, there were no other wards until I got to the base of the vent. There, I encountered the expected ward setup, one that was properly tied into the facility’s ward stone and that I couldn’t break without being noticed.

I could, however, slip through it with a careful application of mana to tease the strands of the ward apart. It didn’t even take that much effort, given my current physical state. I slid past them in a matter of seconds and finally reached the bottom of the vent, where a bonfire burned in a room while dozens of enchantments did their best to clear the smoke and feed clean air to it.

It was all starting to make sense now. This was some sort of disposal room, apparently for the useless wagons, judging by the current contents. Whoever was in charge of disposal probably had a lot of issues with the fire being starved of the air it needed to burn and the enchantments not being powerful enough to offset the smoke.

A small fire would have sufficed and burned indefinitely with just these enchantments, but small fires would take ten times longer to destroy all the wood. Someone had made some modifications to increase airflow, probably without approval and definitely without having it properly secured like the rest of the facility.

No matter how many times I saw evidence of it, I was always struck by how human beings themselves were the weakest point of every security system in existence. All they had to do was not mess with what someone else had set up, but they just couldn’t manage it. Laziness won out in the end – good for me, but bad for whoever had made that vent once the person in charge discovered its existence.

The fire was untended, yet another flaw in their garbage disposal system. But it did allow me to take my time analyzing the wards around the room to confirm that they were designed to keep the smoke from leaking out of the room while the enchantments worked. If I’d still had a face, I would have grinned.

Now that I was inside, it looked like I had damn near free rein of the place. Apparently, if someone was trusted enough to be let in here, they were trusted enough to go anywhere unsupervised. I ghosted through the hallways, past living quarters and mess halls, through workshops and labs, skipped by the sealed room with what was no doubt a massive ward stone sitting in it, and eventually found the main floor.

There were no less than fifty people hard at work there, some of whom were assembling a massive array of what I assumed were parts that had already been delivered beforehand. As I’d expected, it was a three-dimensional puzzle that needed to be built on itself, which explained why none of the sections I’d examined were congruent with each other. Each one went somewhere else on the outermost visible layer of the construct.

This did give me an opportunity to examine more of it, but I’d need to be careful not to tip off any of the mages working here of my presence. And they were mages, every last one. At casual glance, it looked like most of them were at least at stage three with a few stage fours. One woman fully into stage five stood at the far end of the room, discussing something with a group of mages gathered in front of her.

Tempting as it was to go eavesdrop, it was better to keep away from a mage strong enough to reach that level of advancement. I wasn’t truly invisible in this form, though it would be difficult to detect me without specialized divinations or enhanced magical senses like the brakvaw back home had.

I circled around the monstrosity being slowly put together in the center of the room, reading the runes on it and making guesses about what was already hidden below. I couldn’t be certain without tearing it apart, but there was definitely a resonance component to the machine designed to connect to somewhere else, somewhere hundreds and hundreds of miles away.

It wasn’t a standard communications array, more like a syncing construct to ensure both sites were correctly aligned. That didn’t make any sense though, not when it was far cheaper and easier to just build everything in one spot. There had to be more to it.

I kept searching, and to my utter lack of surprise, I found not one, but seven sites besides the one I was at. It took a bit of work to decipher the coordinates, but eventually I had it pieced together. The eight sites formed a giant ring with Ammun’s tower in the center.

Perhaps it was some sort of massive barrier designed to encompass the entire empire he was rebuilding. I didn’t see much reason to put so much effort into that, or to keep it secret even if he did. Ammun wasn’t at war with anyone. As far as I could tell, there simply weren’t anything remotely approaching real nations anymore. The largest kingdoms I’d seen were nothing more than a single city with some vassal towns surrounding it, not unlike Derro.

Maybe that wasn’t it. Ammun’s big problem was that, as a lich, he needed mana just to survive. Undead didn’t generate their own supply, which meant that he was stuck in his tower or near about it. Maybe this project was an attempt to correct that deficiency. If he did it right, the arrays might create a tether of mana connected to him that would let him access his supply as long as he stayed within their bounds.

There were some holes in that theory. Some of the rune constructs I’d examined didn’t support that supposition. Of course, there was no reason to assume these facilities had just a single use. Perhaps they were a barrier, a tether, and more besides. Ammun had already proven his ability to execute a grand design with the formation of his tower, a structure that descended all the way to the world’s core to feed directly on the mana of an entire planet.

Whatever was going on here, destroying it was suddenly my highest priority. I needed to confirm the locations of all eight of these facilities, and to confirm that there even were eight. For all I knew, this might just be a single ring. Maybe there were a hundred more of them radiating out from the tower, each one on their own resonance network.

There wasn’t much more to be gleaned from this site. The mages were too good to risk a casual mind read or to spend more time than I needed to, lest I risk being caught. When I did strike, I needed to be lightning rushing from one facility to the next. If someone spotted me now, everything would be ruined before it even began.

I retreated, my mind whirling with the preparations I’d need to make. At minimum, I needed to set up a teleportation network all over Ammun’s territory and somehow keep it hidden. Then I needed huge caches of mana to replenish myself between attacks, divination blocking tools that I could use to shroud each site so that none of the others would know what was happening.

What I really needed, more than anything else, was some help. But I didn’t have anyone I could trust who was capable of an assault on this level. Tetrin and Hyago were probably the most powerful friendly mages I knew, and neither of them were even combat-oriented, let alone skilled enough to do this kind of fighting. Senica wanted to be a combat specialist, but her core was still at stage one.

There was one possibility, but it would require some work. It was a good thing nobody was nearby when I thought of it, because it was impossible to suppress a groan. Hijacking a golem’s control structure was such tedious, boring work.