Keiran

After draining the mana from all three of them and taking a few minutes to stabilize the woman—and drop a sleep spell on her while she wasn’t in the right state of mind to resist it—I turned my attention to the one I’d dubbed as the clever part of the hit squad.

“Let’s start with your name,” I said.

Tendrils of my mind reading spells wormed their way into his brain, interrupting the man before he could even begin to speak. He recognized it as easily as any other mage would, but I wasn’t trying to be subtle at this point. “Laphlin,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Truth. Good. Next question, Laphlin. How did you find me?”

“Luck and excessive manpower.”

He didn’t need to say anything more than that. I could see it in his mind – hundreds of mages sequestered in a room in Ammun’s tower, all divining different sections of his empire constantly. It was the brute-force equivalent to a full divination ward setup, entirely too wasteful but far quicker to mobilize and cheaper in the short-term.

“That explains how you’re watching all this territory Ammun is trying to claim, not how you found me specifically.”

“I… I don’t know. I didn’t find you,” Laphlin said. “Our senior scrying team did that.”

A vision of six men and women swam across Laphlin’s mind. All of them were powerful, much stronger than Laphlin, and there were notes of reverence tied to the memory. Whoever these mages were, this guy thought they were the pinnacle of diviners. Maybe he was right. Someone had found me, even if I was starting to think it had been a fluke more than anything.

Or maybe I had fouled up some hidden ward at that facility, something that had sent up a silent alarm. It was clear that Laphlin didn’t know. His job had just been to relay my location to the rest of his strike team until they’d gotten close enough for him to lock onto me directly. That did mean that the divination masters back at the tower were likely watching us even now.

Well, that I could fix. I took a moment to cast a master-tier divination ward over the area, one that could stop Ammun himself from peeping on us. It was so expensive to maintain that I’d need to let it drop after a few minutes, but that was fine. It was only a smoke screen to hide my next few spells.

I started by stripping any active spells on all three of my prisoners, something I’d been planning on doing at the end of the interrogation anyway. Depending on what I’d learned, I might have wanted to follow the trail of any divinations attached to them back to the source. Now that I’d plucked the answer to that question directly out of Laphlin’s head, it was no longer necessary.

It took very little effort to set up a quick teleportation circle to spread the effect of the spell to my new victims, and well before the divination blocker expired, I’d whisked all four of us a thousand miles away to a random location I’d dropped a beacon in while I was exploring a few months back.

Laphlin watched me work in silence, and the other two were still held in the grips of my magic. Neither was going anywhere until I decided to let them go, which wouldn’t be until I was done questioning the smart one of the group. When my teleportation spell grabbed hold of us, the man completely deflated, all hope flown from him.

“No, there won’t be any rescue team coming for you,” I said. “There probably wouldn’t be one even if we’d stayed there. Perhaps another kill squad might have attacked me, but at that point you three would just be collateral damage. I doubt very much that your new lich overlord values your lives so highly that he’d let an opportunity to kill me slip by just to save them.”

‘So we’re dead,’ he thought, despair radiating off him in waves.

“I didn’t say that,” I responded to his unspoken assessment. “I need competent underlings just as much as the next archmage, and you wouldn’t be the first mage I’ve recruited from an enemy faction. Really, your survival depends on just how much you can convince me that you’re both trustworthy and an asset. Since I’m in your head, it should be remarkably easy to do so. Or not, I suppose, if you aren’t trustworthy.”

Laphlin gulped and glanced past me to his two unconscious companions. “What… What do you want to know?”

The good news was that he had no intention of lying to me. I’d take it as a start. “Let’s talk about these secret facilities all over the place. What do you know about those?”

* * *

I was relentless in my quest to dig every last useful piece of information out of Laphlin’s head. I took names from him. I took jobs. I took every interaction he had with anyone giving him orders. I learned about Ammun’s new Sanctum of Light, that he’d essentially turned the mages he’d allowed to stay into a military organization and pressganged everyone he’d kicked out into running the farm villages and towns that had been overrun.

Morale was low and dissent was high. The Breakers of Chains were still an active force, though obviously under new leadership since their old boss had been some sort of secret Ammun cultist whose only real goal was to find the being he worshipped and serve him. Now the Breakers were actively fighting Ammun’s hostile takeover, a battle they were losing badly. The only reason their ranks weren’t completely empty was that Ammun’s draconian laws kept driving new recruits to them.

More relevant to my immediate concerns, Laphlin knew absolutely nothing about any secret facilities, let alone whether there were more than the eight I’d already discovered. That was vaguely disappointing, but not surprising. He was a low-level grunt from Ammun’s divination team, not without his talents, but nowhere near the top of the tower hierarchy. He didn’t make decisions, which meant he didn’t need to know about almost anything outside his current objective.

The high point to the whole interrogation was determining that while Laphlin wasn’t much interested in a job offer, he was extremely interested in not working for the tower anymore. As a former spy for one of the Great Houses, he hadn’t been given a choice about being pressed into service in Ammun’s new society. Initially, he’d been grateful to have been spared a one-way trip to the fields, but he’d quickly grown weary of the work he’d been asked to do and, more importantly, the utter lack of compensation he’d received for his efforts.

As a consequence of that, he was more than happy to spill his guts on everything he knew or suspected, often drawing connections between memories I wouldn’t have had the context to do myself. All of this was a mere act of self-preservation. The happier I was with the outcome, the more likely I was to let him go free. At least, that was his hope.

I didn’t have much reason to let him live if he wasn’t going to be useful to me beyond the immediate conversation. As reluctant an enemy as he might have been, he’d still been instrumental in guiding Seven to me. Before I made my final decision, however, I decided to question the other two.

It turned out they knew almost nothing useful. I got some more insight into what was going on in the tower itself, but these two weren’t part of anything important. The mind mage was part of some sort of secret police that interrogated suspected dissidents, and the big guy with the beard was just part of a vanguard unit for any sort of combat. He’d been deployed three times to wipe out villages that had failed to surrender every scrap of food they owned.

Unlike Laphlin, that guy didn’t mind being drafted. In fact, he’d enjoyed crushing the villagers and townsfolk with his magic. The woman didn’t take pleasure from her work invading the minds of those who were abducted for questioning, but she did feel a sort of grim satisfaction at doing it. Every time they managed to uncover someone who’d been actively plotting against Ammun’s new society, it justified their tactics in her mind.

I was certainly no saint. It would be hypocritical of me to judge either of them, so I didn’t. That having been said, I had no use for either and every reason to think that letting them live could come back around to cause problems for me later. They weren’t going to see the next sunrise.

That just left the diviner. Perhaps he saw it in my expression as I considered him and his companions, because his anxiety spiked and he started giving serious consideration to some of the half-hearted escape plans he’d cooked up. Even knowing they were futile, and not just because he was completely overmatched, but because I’d watched his mind concoct them, he was still trying to figure out which one had the best chance of success.

“Relax,” I told him. Unsurprisingly, that did nothing to calm him down.

“You’re going to kill us,” he said. Beads of sweat were forming on his forehead and running down across his face now, and there was a noticeable tremble in his hands.

The bearded man sneered at him. “Coward,” he said. Though he was outwardly calm, he was raging inside, both at the violation of his thoughts and that he’d been bested in combat. Apparently, he’d thought of himself as quite the battle mage prior to me bruising his ego. I honestly should have been thankful for him. His arguing to stay and fight was what had delayed their flight and allowed me to so easily capture them.

The woman, oddly enough, had accepted the mind probe the best out of the three of them. Her defenses were the most formidable, but she knew when she was overmatched and was now the calmest of the three. She was scheming on how best to ingratiate herself to me, everything from offering to go back and spy on my behalf to trying to seduce me with her feminine wiles to buying her life through copious amounts of mana.

She was cold-blooded, that one. If I let her live, that’d be the one I regretted most. With a mental sigh, I dual cast two force spells and slit both their throats at the same time. For the first time, surprise showed on the woman’s face as she tumbled backward. The man tried to summon every last bit of his mana to attack me even as he died, but the bare whisper he called forth couldn’t have hurt me even if I’d stood defenseless and naked in front of him.

“I’m not going to kill you,” I told Laphlin. “I probably should, to be honest. You are a dubious asset at best and more likely a liability. The only reason you’re alive is that you didn’t ask for any of this. So I’ll give you a choice. You’re not going back to the tower. And you’re not coming to work for me. You wouldn’t do it voluntarily and I have no need for your skills, anyway.”

“What’s the choice?” the diviner asked.

“I’ll take you somewhere far away from here, find you a village in need of a mage, and drop you there. You’ll never see your friends or family again. You won’t be working for Ammun anymore. You won’t be anywhere near me or mine. But you’ll be alive.”

“That’s not a choice.”

“You know what the other option is,” I said.

Laphlin swallowed hard and bobbed his head. “Right. I get it. Could it be somewhere warm? I always hated the cold.”

“You’re in luck,” I told him. “Most of the world is quite hot these days.”