Keiran

Sand worms weren’t that smart – something I’d known intellectually but hadn’t really internalized until I’d wasted two hours following my scrying beacon around as the worm crawled through the sand and dirt in great circles, accomplishing absolutely nothing as far as I could tell.

It did confirm for me that they definitely had a mana source somewhere, else they’d have all starved to death given how little sustenance there actually was in the desert sands over a mile below the surface. It was either that or I’d been mistaken about classifying them as monsters. The line between monster and magical animal could get quite blurry, but the way they’d attacked me in suicidal droves when they’d sensed mana coming from me had indicated that the species fell firmly on the monster side of things.

“I might need to seed some of these beacons deeper into the ground,” I mused. “That or I just got unlucky with an exceptionally stupid worm.”

“They’re worms. What were you expecting?” Querit asked. He dropped another stack of books on the table I was sitting at. “These ones, too.”

I swept them up into my phantom space and said, “You know I’ve got enough room to take this entire library, right? And I know they look like worms, but I was expecting something this big to be a bit smarter. There’s more to them than a wriggly, mobile stomach, isn’t there?”

“I don’t know. They weren’t a problem before the moon fell. There was a thick layer of bedrock beneath the city that must have protected us from them. You had to go fifty miles out into the desert to even have a chance of running into something like that.”

Oddly, I hadn’t encountered anything like these sand worms anywhere other than deep under Derro. The closest I’d gotten were their rock worm cousins up in the mountains. Admittedly, I hadn’t gone digging in random spots in the wastes for them, but I’d used plenty of mana. Maybe they didn’t come to the surface anywhere now, or maybe they’d all been drawn to this particular area to feed on the moon core chunk.

Anything that hadn’t or couldn’t make it here in time might have starved and died off centuries ago. It was only a theory, but it made sense. More importantly, if I was right, it was yet more evidence that the sand worms fell firmly into the ‘monster’ category, and that they’d only survived because there was a powerful source of mana buried somewhere down here.

While I waited for Querit to sort through the books to decide what he wanted and what was irrelevant, a chore he insisted on doing right here and now, I idly built a second beacon and stored it away in my phantom space. When that didn’t kill enough time, I made a third and a fourth one. Eventually, I ran out of patience.

“It’s time to wrap this up,” I announced. “Anything you haven’t gotten around to sorting through yet can come with us.”

“But-”

“Give me just one good reason why this needs to be done in this dusty old chamber,” I said. “A good reason, mind you, not something like nostalgia or honoring your sort-of-father’s memory.”

“I just wanted to leave his home as intact as I could,” Querit said. “What’s so wrong about that?”

“I’m heading back to the valley to make more of these scrying beacons. If you need more time to sort through things, then you can stay here and I’ll pick you up when I come back.”

“But what about the worms? They could attack me.”

“You can’t defend yourself?” I asked.

“From one or two, but I don’t regenerate mana like a human.”

“I thought you’d mastered lossless casting.”

“Not for advanced spells! And you know that,” Querit said.

“Fine, I’ll seal up the hole we made and teleport straight back here tonight after I’m done with my worm bait project. You’ll be as safe in these rooms as everything else that’s been locked away in here for centuries.”

Querit reluctantly agreed to that, though it was obvious he wasn’t happy with the idea. I made a mental note to teach him how to build a phantom space so he could shove his various combat frames into it. If I had to babysit him every time he left my demesne, his usefulness was going to drop sharply. What was really surprising to me was how timid he’d turned out to be. He’d held his own against five other mages long enough for me to get there and help; I wouldn’t have thought a bunch of stupid sand worms would have scared him so much.

“For what it’s worth, I know you could handle a couple sand worms,” I said. “You fought worse not that long ago.”

“I appreciate your confidence in my skills, but I’m not a battle mage.”

“I know that you can cast spells that don’t have the runes carved into your core,” I said. “You’re able to freely manipulate mana into any spell you like. You have a memory that beats any human’s. There’s nothing stopping you from becoming an archmage in your own right.”

Querit appeared startled by the idea, as if it had never occurred to him to learn anything outside of what someone else had told him to. Maybe it hadn’t. His thinking was driven by an extraordinarily complex sequence of rune structures that did an incredible job of mimicking human behavior, but in the end, he was still a golem.

Treating him like a person may have been the wrong tactic, but it was difficult not to when he looked and acted like one most of the time. Because he was already capable of casting advanced-tier spells, which made him a better mage than just about anyone else on this whole island, it was also easy to treat him as a contemporary, someone I could rely on when I needed an assistant.

“The mana cost—” Querit began.

“—Will be irrelevant once you fully master lossless casting,” I finished for him.

“You haven’t even mastered it!”

“We’ll work on it together, but later. I have something else to take care of right now.”

I left then, a new teleportation beacon hidden in the suite and the steel wall reshaped to fill in the gap. It was an inch thinner, but that would still be plenty to protect Querit. After I was done, I tossed the new scrying beacon orbs out for the worms, then teleported myself back to my demesne.

I went to my crucible immediately and started manufacturing the orbs as quickly as I could. I also put together a special tank filled with liquid mana, one that I connected to the many, many orbs and which could track their positions, including depth. After sealing that closed, I stashed everything in my storage space and teleported back.

Querit jumped to his feet immediately upon my return, like an excited puppy eager to greet its owner. “You’re back!”

“Yes,” I said, frowning at him. “I was only gone for a few hours. You got the rest of the books sorted?”

“This pile here is coming with us,” he told me, gesturing to a small mountain of books as tall as he was. I eyed it up speculatively, then turned my attention to the rest of the library. About half the shelves were empty now.

“Hardly seems worth sorting them if you’re going to take that much,” I said. It took me a few minutes to pull the books in, each one being its own individual object, then I opened the steel wall back up. “I’m going for a walk around the area to distribute trackers.”

“I’ll come with you,” Querit said quickly.

“Sure, if that’ll make you happy. Do you mind if I leave this tank of liquid mana here?” I asked.

I pulled out the tank, a five-foot square glass construction reinforced with magic. The liquid mana on the inside was enchanted to take the shape of the tunnels, based on my own experience scrying them, and it had already found the tracking orbs I’d left for the worms. They existed as little pinpricks of light, moving around in the mana.

“Fascinating,” Querit muttered as he studied it. “A sympathetic connection?”

“More like an automated scryer with a heavy-duty output device. It’s not foolproof, but I don’t suspect the worms will make any attempt to shield the trackers from being detected.”

“Oh, I see. That’s a remarkably efficient and easy solution, though I can’t imagine that much liquid mana was a cheap medium to use.”

“I had it in storage for alchemy work, and I’ll reclaim it when I’m done with this project, so it’s no real loss,” I explained.

We left the room, something that seemed to cheer Querit up immediately, and started our lap around the tunnels. Every thirty or forty feet, I’d toss another tracker orb out, and occasionally I’d have to kill a few dozen worms that were more interested in us than in the bait.

“So what’s going on with you today?” I asked as I casually dissected a sand worm with a force cleave spell.

“What do you mean?”

“You look kind of depressed. Something in your master’s suite?”

“Nothing in particular. It just kind of reinforced that everything from my time is gone. I knew it already, but that wasn’t the same as seeing it.”

The personality matrix in Querit truly was a work of art, but I couldn’t say I would have made the same. Professor Velder had gone through a great amount of effort to build something that was as close to a person as it was possible to get, which was fascinating, but not really a desirable quality in a research golem.

“I do also feel like I need to remind you that I am unable to cast a teleportation spell myself,” Querit said. “It was a bit anxiety-inducing to be left behind like that – not that I ever lost faith that you’d return, of course.”

“I see. You know the recall bracelet I made for you could have pulled you out if absolutely necessary?”

“I thought that only worked in the area where we did that sabotage job.”

I shook my head. “No, I modified it to be a bit smarter about selecting teleportation beacons based on where you are. At this distance, it would just take you straight back to the valley in a single jump.”

I’d thought he’d known that already. The runes were plain as day on it, and he should have been able to read them. Admittedly, they were sandwiched between two layers of copper so that the outside appeared plain and unadorned, but that wouldn’t stop Querit’s divinations.

After another half an hour of spreading around the bait, we returned to the tracking tank to confirm everything was working. Hundreds of little dots roamed around, none converging on anything just yet or going much deeper than we already were.

“It would have been nice to get immediate results,” Querit lamented as he studied the tank with me.

“It would have, but I’m not surprised. I put in a recording spell so I can review everything whenever I have time. There are no worries about missing something crucial because I wasn’t paying attention. Everything should run for about two days before the orbs lose too much mana; hopefully we’ll have an answer by then.”

“And if not?”

“Then it’s on to the next plan. I’m convinced there’s a moon core buried deep underground here. Getting my hands on it would help immensely with getting the mana needed to form the resonance.”

I wasn’t sure if Querit really agreed with me, but he nodded anyway. I sealed up the entrance again and considered installing some hinges and a lock there for future convenience, then started casting the teleportation spell that would take us home. After a brief, unhappy glance around the last remnants of his creator’s life, Querit joined me.