Keiran

Querit agreed with my theory after I explained it, though he didn’t seem all that excited about it. Considering that I’d potentially gain a huge source of mana generation and kill a whole hell of a lot of the sand worms plaguing the area that he was actively digging through, I’d expected him to care a bit more.

“Oh, it’s not because I think you’re wrong,” the golem said. “It’s because you’ll never find it. These monsters could dig very, very deep back when they were normal sized. Now that they’re all huge like this, I don’t even want to consider how far under the surface they’ve gone. And the smaller ones always end up closest to the open air. It’s more than likely that if you go down another mile or two, you’ll find some big enough to swallow you whole.”

“I’m not worried about fighting them, no matter how big they get, but you’ve got a point on the locating problem. Still, if there is a huge chunk of moon core buried somewhere down here, it should be emitting mana, which should make it a lot easier to find.”

“Unless some enormous sand worm has wrapped itself around the thing and is eating the mana as fast as it can,” Querit pointed out. “Or worse, eaten it.”

“Eaten it?” I asked. “You said this chunk of moon was a hundred feet wide. How big are these damn worms?”

The golem just shrugged. “I’m merely speculating on the possibilities.”

“No one’s saying it’s going to be easy, but I think it’s worth a little effort to determine the viability.”

“I won’t try to stand in your way, but I would appreciate if you stuck around long enough for me to reach the professor’s old chambers.”

I wondered exactly how much would be left of them at this point. Thousands of tons of sand filling every hallway and room in this underground complex was hard on the furnishings, and having enormous worm monsters roaming around wasn’t doing anyone any favors. Even if there had been some enchantments protecting things, they’d surely have failed by now.

Then again, the civilization that had built all of this did have a tendency to build things to last. Even after a thousand years, there were still a few wisps of mana here or there, which was surprising since the worms should have gotten into those remaining enchantments a long time ago. Only the durability of the construction of certain rooms had kept them out. Perhaps Professor Velder’s suite had been given the same treatment.

It took us four hours of work to finally reach it, lengthened only slightly when Querit realized we’d accidentally passed underneath the room and had to calculate the correct exit a few hundred feet back. Eventually, we ran into a steel wall, a sight which pleased the golem to no end.

“Now we just need to cut through this and we’re in,” he said happily.

“Should be easy enough as long as there are no lingering wards, which I’m not sensing.”

“It is six inches thick, though.”

“Really? Why?”

Querit just shrugged. “I didn’t build it. This’ll probably take me a few minutes to make a door. Would you mind watching for monsters?”

“Sure,” I said. I settled back to wait while Querit worked, my mind split between keeping track of earth sense and the other divinations I was running and considering the best place to look for a chunk of stolen moon core.

The original impact site was the underground lake. I’d already confirmed that by diving down to the bottom years ago and recovering the chunk of moon rock there. If there’d been more at the time, and presumably not underwater, then it would have been taken from there.

As far as I could tell, the sand worms couldn’t easily dig through rock. If they couldn’t do it now, they certainly wouldn’t have been able to back when they were all relatively tiny. Depending on the ground composition, I might be able to trace a trail downward from the bottom of the impact site to wherever the worm’s main colony was.

That wouldn’t necessarily lead me to the moon core, however. At best, it would lead me to where the worms used to live a thousand years ago. If I managed to find that spot, there was every possibility that they’d have long since moved on, and I’d just have to hope I could keep following a century-old trail.

That plan wasn’t going to work. It relied on too many assumptions, and the odds of it failing at any given step were far too high. I needed something cleverer, and I thought I knew exactly what that something was.

“Scrying beacons,” I announced, surprising Querit and causing him to look back at me.

“What about them?”

“I’ll build a few steel balls with scrying beacons sealed inside and a coating of mana on the outside. Then I’ll feed them to the worms around here so I can track where they go. Most of them will end up wasted, but I can keep track and, sooner or later, one of them will lead me to the rest of the colony where the moon core is.”

“Huh. Well, it could work, I suppose. Do you have a way of preventing the monsters from eating the mana right out of the beacons and destroying them?”

“I have a few ideas. I’ll need to experiment.”

I might also need to figure out how long a giant sand worm’s digestive tract was, though that might end up being a nonissue. As long as they still had mana in them, there was every possibility the worm would simply eat it again after shitting it out. The real challenge would be keeping the beacon intact.

I scooped up a chunk of steel Querit had discarded from the wall as he slowly forced his way through and transmuted it into a perfect hollow sphere four inches wide, then split it open. Inscriptions on the inside would probably be the best way to physically protect the beacon from being destroyed by the rigors of a sand worm’s intestines.

For the actual beacon itself, I could hide it with an aura of untraceability, though that would only last for a day or so unless I made some serious effort to extend it. The problem there was that the spell had harsh diminishing returns, requiring more than double the mana just to get a few extra hours out of it.

I shook my head and smiled. It wasn’t even that expensive of a spell to begin with. I could afford the inefficiency. Then I bit back a sigh. I could afford the inefficiency on one unit, but I was planning on making hundreds of them. If this plan didn’t work, I’d be out a significant chunk of mana, multiple master-tier spells’ worth.

There was no point in worrying about it before I’d even tested it. Using a transmutation spell, I carved away steel from the inner curve, adjusting the rune shape to account for the fact that I wasn’t working on a flat surface. Once I was done, I fused both halves back together and used a minor divination to confirm everything was lined up properly inside. Then I powered the inscription, threw an aura of untraceability over it, and infused mana into the outside of the orb.

Querit paused in his own work again and said, “Clever. How long will it last?”

“A single day,” I told him. “I want to make sure it works at all before I waste time and mana manufacturing hundreds of them.”

I gave the sphere an underhand throw that sent it a hundred feet down the tunnel. It rolled out of sight, following the downward slope we’d accidentally made, and waited for a worm to come along and eat it. I’d killed everything in the immediate area already, but it wouldn’t take long before something new showed up.

“I’ve got a small opening carved into this wall,” Querit told me. “It should only take another ten minutes or so.”

I waved a hand and slashed through the steel with force magic in the outline of an eight-foot door frame, then pulled the steel into my phantom space to be recycled later. Querit gaped at me for a second, then annoyance flashed across his face.

“You could have saved me some work!”

“I was busy with something else. I thought you’d get through it on your own faster than you did.”

I cast a light spell and sent the orb into the newly-revealed room. There wasn’t much to see at first, not with all the dust in the air, but that was easy enough to filter out. Once I’d cleaned the place up, I got my first look inside.

Old, faded carpets covered the floor, possibly a vibrant red once upon a time, but now more the color of dried, sun-bleached blood. A bed dominated the room, far too large for a single person to need. The sheets, now threadbare and rotted, had been kicked down to the bottom, and pillows were strewn haphazardly about the room, with only a handful still on the bed itself.

There was a writing desk in one corner with stacks of yellowed parchment and a few ink wells that had long since dried out. More papers were scattered across the floor, along with the nibs of dozens of quills.

“Your professor was a bit disorganized,” I remarked.

“He was a slob,” Querit corrected, his lips pursed as he surveyed the mess. “Every few days, I’d have to come in and clean the place up. Obviously, I didn’t get to it before… everything.”

“I hope he was more diligent with his research than he was with his personal quarters.” He’d almost have to be to have built a golem like Querit.

“That I kept strictly organized. Come on, it’s just through that door on the far side.”

We stepped into the room and I noted the golem had done an excellent job of placing our makeshift entrance between furniture. A few feet in either direction and I’d have been knocking over either a wardrobe or a standing shelf to make room. I eyed the shelf up, noting the various curios scattered across it.

“The professor was a collector?” I asked, gesturing to my left.

“Something like that, though it’s probably not what you think. He was known to become fascinated with random things, especially objects with rich history that he could divine. Those are bribes from politicians trying to swing his vote on city policy that he kept as tokens to laugh about later. None of them were what he considered to be interesting.”

“Politics.” I practically spat the word out.

“Necessary bureaucracy,” Querit corrected.

It wasn’t worth the argument, especially not over a culture that had mostly died out a thousand years ago. Their descendants were pale imitations of the greats of Querit’s time, not even able to fathom the works the ancient mages had achieved, let alone replicate them.

I followed the golem through the mess of Velder’s bedroom and through a slightly cleaner receiving room, though that too needed the dust cleared from the air. After that, we came to the library, which was happily just as organized as Querit had claimed it would be.

Keeper would have choked with envy if she’d known such a trove of information was under her feet this whole time. Even I was interested in what magical secrets might be hidden in these books. It was obvious that knowledge had advanced in the thousand years between my demise and Ammun’s foolish actions, and I was eager to catch up on what I’d missed.

Before I could dive into that, something else caught my attention. “Ah, we’re in luck,” I said. “Something picked up my scrying beacon. It’s moving to the east and holding strong. Looks like I’ll be making more of them and hoping they lead me to a broken moon core.”

Querit just shook his head and went back to looking through the brittle old tomes.