Keiran

Based on some testimonies from a few of the flock’s primary hunters, we eventually narrowed Ammun’s mages’ entry point down to three possible portals. I gave all three a thorough examination and found evidence that one had been subverted to include an extra twenty-some people onto its registry.

“There’s proof, then,” I muttered to myself while I decided what to do about it.

The best thing from my perspective was to shut them all down. There was still a chance the actual location of the island hadn’t been discovered, though if the portal expert who’d modified my designs had taken the time to check, he could have figured things out. I could easily envision a scenario where they sent information back to the tower to let Ammun know what they’d discovered before venturing across the portal’s threshold.

I had to assume more attacks would be coming whether I closed the portals down or not – they just might take a few extra weeks to arrive if I cut off the shortcut into the island. That might not be enough time to forge a resonance point and bring my mana core up to stage seven, but it would certainly let me generate a nice chunk of much-needed mana to power my defenses.

I flagged that portal to break in exactly eight hours when it ran out of mana, and also made it only work in one direction. That way, any brakvaw on the other side would have time to return instead of being stranded. Then I considered the other portals. The best I could do was to alter the inscriptions to blow themselves up if anyone tried to modify the registry, which would allow the brakvaw to still use them now, but no new ones to be added. It also ran the risk of locking them out of the eyrie if someone else tampered with the portal while they were on the other side.

‘I need you to make some decisions,’ I telepathically sent to Grandfather. ‘I can rig the portals to collapse if anyone tries to tamper with them like the group that got through did, but it means no new brakvaw can be added to them. It also means that if any brakvaw is out hunting when they collapse, we’ll have to manually fetch them.’

A moment later, I got his reply. ‘I’ll discuss this with the council and get you an answer shortly. We’re already in session.’

Damn it. I had other things to do and I didn’t want to come back. Minutes passed while I sat there, waiting and watching brakvaw fly around. None approached the portals, presumably on orders from the elders. Until we determined exactly what I’d be doing to them, it was best not to let anyone else go through.

With nothing better to do, I scried on my orb tracker vat back below Derro, hoping to see something interesting going on. I couldn’t manipulate the device’s fine controls from this distance, but I could tell it to show me what had happened over the last few hours. It was, sadly, about what I had expected. The experiment would need another round, this time with the tracking orbs seeded deeper under the surface. Hopefully my test batch would be enough to get the job done – once I had time to go dump them.

There was nothing else to see there, and I still hadn’t gotten a response from Grandfather, so I turned my divinations to their council meeting. It wasn’t hard to find; Grandfather couldn’t physically go anywhere, leaving only his location as the place for the brakvaw to meet in person.

One of their strange innate magics allowed them to shrink their bodies, though from what I understood, it was a skill to be mastered like any other. Some of them were incredibly adept at it, able to reduce themselves down to a man-sized bird instead of a two-story-house-sized bird. Others struggled to shrink their physical forms down by more than a tiny fraction.

The elders and Grandfather were the best mages among their species, and that meant all of them had mastered their innate abilities. I found them gathered around Grandfather, who himself remained his true size in order to continue channeling the spell that held their floating graveyard up. It made them look like a gaggle of school children being minded by their teacher.

“-can’t shut down the Green Plains portal,” one of the elders said in their ear-splitting screech of a language. Figuring out how to translate that into Enotian had been a chore and a half. “Almost a third of our food is coming from that area alone.”

“Only because we can send so many of our hunters to one location. The other areas will pick up the slack once we reallocate resources to them,” a different elder argued.

“They won’t bring back the same volume,” the first one said. “And they certainly won’t find any more of those little green and brown things with the shells. You know, the crunchy ones.”

Why that should be an argument to leave such a massive security risk open was beyond me, but for some reason, the elder’s words seemed to sway the others. I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt and hoped it was the amount of food being brought back that they cared about, not the loss of some particular brakvaw delicacy.

Either way, it didn’t matter. I was shutting the portal down. Their debate needed to be on what to do with the rest of them. With a sigh of disgust, I let the scrying spell go.

‘I’m leaving in five minutes if I don’t have an answer,’ I sent to Grandfather. ‘Get your council off the topic of the portal I already destroyed and onto whether they want to keep the rest of them unchanged.’

‘You are too impatient,’ Grandfather sent back.

‘At my age, you would be too.’

I was well past the point in my life where I waited in audience halls to petition others for favors, and being reincarnated had done nothing to change my stance on that. It really wasn’t much of a stretch to say that other than Ammun himself, there probably wasn’t a single person on the planet who had a prayer of making me do anything I didn’t want to.

Except my family. Somehow, I always ended up doing what they wanted. It was hard to complain, though; without them, I would never have encountered the brakvaw and learned lossless casting. The giant birds might be a bit of a headache now, but they’d basically given me access to unlimited mana for any spell I might want to cast below master-tier, and even that was something I was getting closer to.

Three minutes later, Grandfather projected his human shape to me. He looked like an old man, his head full of hair the same steel gray as his real plumage. “We’ve reached a decision,” he told me.

“We?”

“Fine. I’ve reached a decision, and I’ve forced my bickering children into agreement. Are you happy now?”

“That depends on what the decision is,” I said.

It was kind of funny how many bird-like mannerisms showed through, even in his human shape. I could practically see his ruffled feathers in the set of his shoulders, but he pushed his annoyance down and said, “We’d like the remaining portals restricted for now. Our hope is to open the Green Plains back up after this whole dispute you have going on with that lich is resolved. In the meantime, we’d like to have a different portal opened somewhere else to offset losing a hunting ground.”

“You don’t ask for much, do you?”

“I’m aware of how much work it’ll be. I’d planned on slowly bringing my council around to just closing Green Plains and restricting the rest, but someone got impatient and forced me into an action before the time was right.”

I shrugged. “I just fended off a hostile assault on my home earlier today. I have other things to do besides securing these portals. I’ll do the registry restrictions now, but then I’m leaving. Your flock will need to figure out how to survive with just fifteen portals.”

I took Grandfather’s silence as agreement and got to work while he watched. “What are you going to do about the lich?” he asked after I finished the first portal.

“Finish rebuilding my mana core. Find him. Destroy him,” I said. “Assuming I have enough time, which is looking less and less likely.”

“And if you don’t?”

“Then I guess I’ll need to get clever.” Running wasn’t a good option, but it might be my only choice if Ammun managed to get his tethering device working. His flunkies were one thing, but I wasn’t even confident I could battle his bone dragon right now, let alone Ammun himself.

Breaking the tower would go a long way toward killing Ammun, and he knew that. That was a big reason I suspected he never left it, not even to travel the short distance he could get away with. He knew I was spying on Ralvost and probably worried that I’d find some way to sabotage his demesne if he left it unguarded, and who else besides him could protect it from me?

If only I hadn’t shown Averin the door that led to the lich’s tomb. That tower would have crumbled around his phylactery, burying him fifty miles under the surface, and I wouldn’t be in this situation. It was funny how one small mistake could turn into such a disaster.

“Liches aren’t invincible,” I said. “If he showed up at my demesne, just him, I might beat him in a straight fight. The problem is that it won’t be a straight fight, and even if I win, all I’m doing is banishing him back to his phylactery for a few hours, maybe a day at most. If I really want to end it, I need to be strong enough to get back into the tower to hunt down whatever rock he’s got his soul bound to.”

“That seems impossible, from what I understand,” Grandfather remarked.

“That’s about how it seems to me, too,” I admitted. “I’m working on some alternatives, but all of that is just to catch up to a target that I know isn’t standing still and waiting for me. It’s not going to be easy, especially if he finds a way to keep pushing me without this portal.”

I left unsaid my suspicions that more of his agents would arrive on the island to establish their own portals soon enough. They’d probably build a base camp somewhere in the mountains surrounding my valley, nowhere near the brakvaw and not their problem. My bigger concern was them realizing the connection I had to New Alkerist.

I needed Querit to finish modifying lossless casting to work with enchantments so I could set up proper defenses for the village, and I needed it done a week ago. Stopgap measures would have to suffice today, but I didn’t want to think of someone in my family dying because I couldn’t get there fast enough to save them.

“I know that my children have not always been friendly to you and yours,” Grandfather said, “but please count us as allies if you need us.”

“I need mana,” I said immediately. “As much of it as I can possibly get. If you’re serious about an offer to help, I’ll drop a whole bank of storage crystals here for your flock to fill.”

“I can’t promise how quickly we can fill them, or how many will come to your aid, but I will do my best to see that you receive what you ask for.”

“Thanks,” I said. A knot of tension started to unravel in the back of my neck. Brakvaw were big, and they had a lot of mana. It probably wasn’t enough to ignite an artificial mana resonance, but it would be a huge step in the right direction.

I paused for a second in my work as a thought occurred to me. Maybe I could do them a good turn as well. “Say… how do brakvaw feel about sand worms?”