Keiran

Querit had been my guest for a week now while I attended other business. During that time, he’d been perfectly reasonable in all ways but one, and that was that he was the most mana-hungry creature I’d ever seen. His golem core drank mana at a rate of three or more master-tier spells a day, more than I could even have produced at stage two or three. Fortunately, stage six didn’t have such feeble limitations. It was costing me dearly to host the golem, but not to the point of ruin.

I spent that time trying to find more frames for him to use, specifically his research frame. The whole setup made a kind of roundabout sense to me when I thought about it, but it still seemed inefficient to build a single golem that could take on multiple different roles when it would have been just as easy to create multiple golems instead. This Professor Velder person must have been desperately lonely to build himself a companion.

His work, unfortunately, was buried deep, deep underground. My efforts to unearth anything for Querit’s use had been completely unsuccessful, and though he never complained about it, Querit made me very aware that he was limited in his efforts without the tools his research frame gave him.

“That’s not to say I’m not making progress!” he assured me one day when we were discussing it. “This method of cycling mana back into the core is rather ingenious. I’ve managed to apply the technique to a few beginner spells already, and it’s only a matter of time until I can refine my abilities.”

“So quickly?” It had taken me much longer. Perhaps he just had a better teacher than I did. Surely, that was the case. I definitely wasn’t competing with a sapient research golem.

“From what I understand of how things work, I have a few ideas on why you’ve been having difficulty adapting it to free-standing spells, but I think I might be able to make it work. I just need to progress my own skills enough to begin testing,” he said. He was so earnest and eager about it that I just shook my head and laughed.

“I’m sure you’ll get it figured out in no time,” I said. “In the meantime, I’ll try digging through the next section today. I’m almost positive someone collected and moved your frames somewhere else. They might not even be in the city anymore.”

I was afraid I’d be asking Keeper to do more research for me. Worse, I was afraid the answer she’d find was that they were all locked up in the Hierophant’s treasury, covered in dust and their true purpose long forgotten. Anything I was interested in was automatically valuable to those people, even if they had no idea what it did themselves. Just the fact that I wanted it made it a point of leverage to be used against me, which was one of the big reasons I did my best not to associate with them.

Stealing the frames was always an option, but I didn’t even know if they existed. I could be breaking into the royal treasury for nothing. It wouldn’t hurt to take a look around, I supposed. It wasn’t like their wards could stop me from at least scrying in there to see if the frames had been collected and stored away hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

It did require a quick teleportation out in that direction. Derro was far enough away from my demesne that it would present an extra layer of difficulty to pierce the wards remotely, so I spent the mana to go address them in person. Luckily for me, no one other than Keeper, Zara, and a few palace officials I’d had to deal with when I’d repaid my mana debt to the city really knew what I looked like anymore, so it was practically impossible to run into anyone who’d want some of my attention here.

At least, that was the plan.

I wasn’t three seconds off the platform before I heard someone say, “Hey! Wait!”

Since I was the only person there—and since I could see the woman pointing at me through one of my area scrying spells, I stopped and turned around. I honestly couldn’t place her appearance, but a quick brush of her mind filled me in. She worked for the Actalus family and had seen me when Keeper and I had gone there to try to negotiate access to their catacombs. Right. I’d forgotten about that meeting.

I regarded her as politely as I could manage and waited for her to cross the plaza from where she’d been sitting in the shade. “You’re him,” she said. “The archmage.”

“I’m afraid you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” I told her.

“No I didn’t. I remember you.”

“You’re mistaken, and even if you weren’t, would it really be a good idea to accost someone with that much power in the middle of the street?”

“I’m not… accosting.”

“Then what are you doing?” I asked.

“I just wanted to say hi to someone I recognized.”

“Very well. You’ve done so.” I turned to leave.

“Wait! Wait.”

“I really am very busy,” I told the girl while I internally debated the merits of flying out of this conversation. It would draw eyes to me, but it might be worth it.

“Look, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a pest-”

“And yet you’re doing it so well.”

“-but Lady Actalus has people watching all over the city to track your movements,” the girl finished in a rush.

I paused again and frowned. “Why?”

“She doesn’t share her reasons with the servants,” the girl said.

“That’s not what I meant. Why are you telling me this?”

“You spared my sister a few years ago.”

I had? It was possible, I supposed. I hadn’t gone out of my way to kill too many people outside the Wolf Pack itself. The Enforcers suffered the most damage from my rampage, but considering that they’d been working directly for the Wolf pack, I’d considered them enemy combatants. I couldn’t think of any I’d spared, though.

“Her name is Lyxana,” the girl continued. “She worked for Blue Rat’s crew.”

I vaguely remembered someone of that name. I’d only met her once after cutting through the street gang to find their leader. She’d been working security at the building he’d been using as a base to try to hunt me down at Roenark Actalus’s orders. She’d been personable and friendly, and had made a few judgment calls that had kept a lot of other people from dying by attempting to ambush me.

“She was smart enough to stay out of trouble,” I said. “I didn’t spare her.”

“So you are Keiran!” the woman said, her finger pointed at me like she’d managed to trick me into confessing my guilt.

“Thanks for the warning,” I said. “Consider us even if you’d like. I need to get going.”

“But what about the people looking for you?”

I shrugged. “I won’t be here long. If they’re smart, they’ll stay away from me.”

“Please don’t hurt them,” the girl said. “We don’t have a choice. The nobles made us do this.”

I waited a moment to be sure she was done, then firmly said, “Thanks again. Goodbye.”

* * *

Keeper probably knew what was going on. Despite how much of a hermit she was, she valued knowledge too much not to have an informant network. I’d never proven it, but I suspected she’d run the Wolf Pack’s spy network under the moniker ‘Sibilant,’ a persona that hadn’t even existed despite many people being completely convinced they’d dealt with the man personally. There was no reason to think that she’d cut those contacts loose just because the Wolf Pack had broken apart. If there was one thing Keeper would freely spend resources on, it was acquiring new knowledge.

If it became an issue, I’d talk to her about it. For now, I wanted to be in and out of town as quickly as possible. If the frames were in the royal vaults and I had to steal them, it’d be better to do so at a time when no one realized I was around. I planned on doing nothing but some light spying today.

Cloaking myself in invisibility and lifting up into the air, I skimmed across the rooftops until I reached the Hierophant’s palace. They’d long since repaired the damage I’d done breaking in years ago, but with the loss of mana as a currency, they’d had to downgrade their wards.

That was good for me. It made my job easier. I was able to perch on top of one of the watchtowers on the outer wall, two oblivious guards not ten feet beneath my feet, while I probed the remaining wards for weaknesses.

I didn’t know exactly where the treasury was, but I felt it was a safe bet that it’d be somewhere the wards still covered. I could cross the royal suites off my list immediately. I’d already mapped those out years ago. The prison was also warded, oddly enough. I supposed with the Enforcers’ collective fall from grace once the Wolf Pack lost control of the city, the Hierophant had opted to house his criminals elsewhere. I wouldn’t have thought it would be in his own palace, however.

Maybe they were important prisoners. Either way, the dungeon was another place I didn’t expect to find treasure vaults. I stretched my scrying spells out in multiple directions, hoping to run across something through sheer overwhelming magic, but I quickly grew tangled up in multiple wards and was forced to narrow my scope back down.

Then I found it, barely a thousand feet from the Hierophant’s personal quarters. The hallway was patrolled, and the door was manned by four different palace guards in front. It was locked and warded, and when my divinations squirmed their way through, I found a golem construct on the inside in the shape of a decorative stone statue. It depicted a four-armed man, each hand holding a curving sword, but the magic imbued into it would allow it to come to life and attack anyone who lacked proper clearance.

That included me, of course. But the wards would need to detect me first. I wasn’t even physically there, so I wasn’t worried about triggering that particular defense. My magic glided past the construct and into the main vault, where I took a quick glance around.

There were a few lock boxes and chests full of the city’s new currency, though not as many as I would have expected to find in the treasury of its ruler. Perhaps they were still making the notes. Its very strength, that it wasn’t replicable with easy transmutation magic, also made it difficult to produce large quantities of it.

Other than that, there were a few stands with various odds and ends. I saw examples of inscribed objects, nothing terribly complex, and a few enchanted pieces that had somehow survived intact despite being in storage for what I could only assume was many, many years. Those weren’t what I was interested in.

After that came the magical armaments, including a set of draw stone shields I’d had the misfortune to have to fight against years ago. Those had been a giant pain to deal with then, though these days I had so many options available to me that it would be trivially easy to work around the defense.

Beyond those was a heaping pile of leech stones, the former currency of the city. Those had fallen out of favor once the knowledge on how to ignite mana cores had started spreading and mana became much more freely available. Someone had been thorough about cleaning every last bit of mana out of the stones before they’d been tossed into bins and left to collect dust.

And that was it. There were plenty of things of dubious value, but not the things I was looking for. It had been a longshot, anyway. The chances of someone recognizing the armors for what they were and stowing them away were almost none in this day and age.

That was when I realized that I had also fallen into the same trap. I’d already seen a frame. It just wasn’t in the treasury. It was standing on a pedestal, held upright and used as a bit of decoration in the corner of one of the dining rooms, polished to a shine and otherwise ignored.

At least it’d be easy to steal.