Keiran

“I don’t want to commit to anything,” I said. “There’s a lot going on right now, and it’s all kind of time-sensitive.”

“I understand, but hear me out.”

Querit cast a quick illusion spell, and a cityscape appeared between us right at waist level. “This is Derro as I remember it,” he explained. “From what I can tell, the aboveground portion is mostly the same layout, though it’s in bad shape. Below that is the city sewers, and below that is the sub-plate that the real infrastructure sits on.”

As he spoke, the illusion divided itself into three pieces, with the aboveground and sewer sections rising up out of the way to leave the sub-plate. It was an impressively complete map, detailing what was probably a thousand miles of tunnels and chambers bored out of the bedrock beneath the city.

“Here is where the central city pillar sat, the room you found me in,” Querit said.

“Yes, I remember. You showed me this when I went digging for your frames.”

“Right, and you checked the places I pointed you to where my other frames were stored, but as I understand it, you didn’t look anywhere else?”

“I had other concerns,” I said. “Why, where do you want to look now?”

Twenty different spots lit up on the map, one after another, all of them scattered in every direction. “These are places I think could hold something valuable. Some of them held mana banks of various types. Some were workshops full of delicate and valuable equipment. A few were libraries and archives which are hopefully preserved well enough that they’re still intact.”

“Those could all justify the time and expense of an expedition,” I said, “but is any of it truly necessary right now?”

“Just one spot,” Querit told me. “This one, here. This was Professor Velder’s private quarters. Tucked away in his personal library are all his notes on creating artificial mana resonance points.”

I frowned. “I thought you already knew everything there was to know on the subject.”

“I know everything the professor taught me. That does not mean I know everything he knew, and to be honest, we’re adapting the spells to fit this new environment anyway. It’s likely we’ll hit a few stumbling blocks along the way, and the research left behind here might provide us with valuable insights on how to navigate those problems.”

That was a dubious claim to me. Querit had explained how the project would advance, and I’d already accounted for several spots that would need to be adapted for a mana-starved environment. It was possible we’d run into problems I hadn’t foreseen, but it seemed like it would be better to proceed until we were stymied, and only then go looking for outside help.

There was also the fact that the golem claimed they’d managed to manufacture several resonance points back in his time, which meant that the process worked from start to finish. The only issue should be adapting it to our modern environment, which meant that his fake father’s notes probably wouldn’t provide solutions to any of the problems we’d run into.

“Do you honestly think we need these notes, or do you just want an excuse to find out what happened to everyone when the moon fell out of the sky and destroyed the city?” I asked.

“I…” Querit trailed off and let out a heavy sigh. “Maybe we can figure it out on our own, but it wouldn’t hurt to go check, would it? And yes, I’m hoping to find some answers to my own mysteries. What’s so wrong about that?”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” I said. “I did something similar when I reincarnated into this body. But I really don’t have the time to run fool’s errands right now.”

“I helped you break Ammun’s machines,” Querit pointed out. “You said that’d give you at least a year. You can’t spare a few days out of a whole year?”

“I don’t know,” I told him bluntly. “Maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. All I can do is prepare as best I can and hope that I do it well enough that when Ammun does make his move, he doesn’t destroy me.”

“And you’ll do it faster if I’m helping you. Just think of how much time you’ll save with me working for you over the next year. It’s way more than you’ll spend helping me do this one thing right now.”

He had a point, and it wasn’t like taking a few days to help him dig was going to halt my demesne’s mana generation. I’d be out some research time, but ultimately, making enough mana to forge the resonance point was going to be the longest part of the project.

“Fine, fine. You win.” I held up my hands in surrender. “Give me a day to get things set up here, and we’ll go digging in the sand.”

“Thank you!” Querit said. “I promise, we’ll find plenty of useful stuff. You won’t be disappointed.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep. You have no idea what’s still left down there or what condition it’s in.”

“Well that’s just not true. I’ve been scrying the area quite extensively.”

“And what have you found?”

“Mostly a lot of sand worms,” the golem admitted. “Actually, a rather disturbing amount. I’ve got some speculations that the moon chunk that wrecked the city might have also cracked the foundation it was built on, which let in a whole underground ecosystem.”

“Good theory,” I offered. “And another time, I might be interested in discussing it, but if we’re going to do this, I have work to take care of.”

“Right. Of course. I understand. I should get my own affairs in order,” Querit said. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

He rushed off, leaving me standing by myself as his illusion started to dissolve into motes of light. I sighed and shook my head, then teleported back to my own workshops. I needed to use up some of the mana building in my demesne if I was going to be gone for so many days in a row, and I had a hundred different projects I could spend it on.

* * *

“Where are we?” Querit asked when the teleport ended. “I don’t recognize this room.”

“One of the smaller pillars was here,” I said. “This was as close as I could get to where you think your professor’s personal rooms were.”

The room was partially collapsed, the entire north half filled with sand held back by a wall of stone I’d transmuted to keep it out of the way. In the center of the room was a pit six feet deep left over from my excavation of the mysteel pillar that had formerly graced the chamber with its presence.

“There should be a tunnel leading out of here behind all that sand,” Querit said.

“The only thing behind the sand is more sand,” I told him. “You’re going to be digging the whole way through.”

“I think you mean we’ll be digging.”

“No, I don’t. You’ll be digging. I’ll be keeping the monsters from eating you.”

“Oh…” Querit eyed the huge retaining wall holding back the sand and sighed. “That’s probably a good division of labor.”

“How are you planning on doing it?” I asked.

“Force spells, mostly.”

I shook my head. “You’re going to bury us alive. I thought you knew about architecture.”

“What? Why would you think that?”

“You know so much about the city and how it’s built.”

“I know where things were built, not the techniques used in their construction.”

I considered the golem gravely and wondered what the odds were of him getting me killed down here. I was going to have to show him how to properly excavate at least the first tunnel to make sure he did the rest right.

“Okay, there are two steps. First is material removal, then structural reinforcement. Transmutations are safest for both, since you can turn the loose dirt and sand into retaining walls and support beams. It’s slow going, but it’s the only safe way to do it.”

“What if something attacks us?” he asked.

“Then you let me handle it. I can kill anything down here without bringing the tunnel down on our heads. You know how to cast sand to granite?”

“Yes, of course.”

I nodded. “Let’s start there then. We’ll float up to the top of the room and I’ll split this wall. Gravity can take some of the sand out of our way before we start working.”

The two of us levitated up to the ceiling and I broke down the wall. Tons of sand and dirt spilled out, filling in the hole I’d left from removing the mysteel pillar and half of the rest of the room on top of it. I created giant scoops of force and started digging, and after a moment’s hesitation, Querit joined me.

“I thought you said we’d be transmuting to dig,” he said.

“As soon as we’re in the tunnel. This room is a big stone box. It’s already stable.”

After a few minutes of work, we dug out enough sand to see the entrance to what had at one time been a hallway. Now it was just hard-packed dirt and sand. “There’s no point in following the old floor plan,” I said. “Figure out a straight line to where we want to go and we’ll dig directly to it.”

Querit didn’t need to summon a map to get the correct angle, and within a minute he was chaining transmutation spells one after another. I joined him, mostly to ensure that everything was being done properly and to help speed things up. Once I picked up the first worm coming in with earth sense, though, I had to shift priorities.

“Take two steps back,” I ordered.

“What? Why?” he asked, looking back over his shoulder at me.

I reached out and hauled on his collar, dragged him back out of the way just in time to avoid having one of the sand worms come up and bite down on his leg. A quick force cleave spell split it apart before it could dive back underground.

“That’s why.”

“Oh,” he said with a nervous laugh. “That was a lot bigger than I was expecting it to be.”

“Really?” I asked. It seemed about average from what I’d seen of the breed.

“They’re usually a quarter that size.”

I thought he said he’d been scrying this area. Whatever he was using must not have been very good if he was surprised by how big the worms were.

“Take a few more steps back behind me,” I said. “There are a few more coming in now.”

I slaughtered them one after another while Querit watched, slack-jawed. “Why are they all so big?” he demanded, as if I had the answer.

“I don’t know. They just are. I don’t sense anything else coming our way, so get back to work.”

“There must be a reason for it,” he murmured. “Some sort of mutation in their past, maybe? Perhaps the moon fragment caused it.”

“I already recovered the piece of moon that dropped onto Derro,” I said. “It doesn’t have any mana coming off it now, and it probably never did.”

“Oh no, I remember when we detected it coming down on us. It was only a few weeks back for me. It was ablaze with mana, all hundred feet of it.”

“Hundred? It’s not even a tenth of that.”

Maybe it had shattered on impact and the other pieces had been taken away. Perhaps they’d left the chunk I’d found because, without any mana in it, the survivors had never discovered it. No, it had been very conspicuously located at the bottom of its own crater, what was now a huge underground lake.

Maybe the locals hadn’t carted off the chunks of moon core that could still make mana. Maybe something else had, some monster from the deep, a sand worm progenitor. If that chunk of moon rock was still buried underground and making enough mana to cause thousands and thousands of sand worms to grow to colossal sizes, it might be worth digging to see if I could find it.

“I think mucking around down here could pay off after all,” I said.

Querit paused in his work to peer at me, then muttered, “Why does that make me so nervous all of a sudden?”