Keiran

I stopped back home to use my crucible and let Querit know what happened to the mage I’d gone to collect. Without the planned second set of notes, it was going to be far more difficult to confirm which parts of the rune structures were accurate, but I had faith in the golem’s research ability. He’d literally been created to be a lab assistant and had all the tools he needed built directly into his golem core.

He was less than impressed with my faith in his abilities, or maybe he was just feeling the pressure to succeed. I wasn’t sure what his old life had been like, but it probably hadn’t involved speedy research into pioneering new techniques to fend off the predations of a powerful archmage lich. In all fairness, that was a lot for anyone to handle.

Once I’d passed on the update, I stashed my trinkets into my phantom space and teleported to the tunnels below Derro to seed my new and improved scrying beacons as far underground as possible. Unfortunately, that was not a particularly quick or easy task. Just opening a dozen holes wide enough to drop the orbs a few hundred feet down took me hours to accomplish, hindered by the fact that hundreds upon hundreds of sand worms were drawn to the mana I was using to transmute the sand and stone.

That did take care of the other part of my plan. Every corpse got tossed into a special box I’d made. It was a two-foot cube with an open top that opened into a pit fifty times that size. Everything inside went into stasis, essentially keeping it fresh forever. By the time I was done, it was over half full with sand worm corpses, which ought to keep a few brakvaw fed for a week or two.

It was kind of a pain to use, though. For one thing, I had to be far more deliberate in my use of force magic to kill the worms so I had more than just shredded corpses. For another, I needed to make sure the worms were actually dead, something which took a surprisingly long time, else shoving a decapitated-but-still-living worm into the spatially expanded storage box would cause it to tear itself to pieces. Spatial expansion and live creatures did not mix well together.

The final problem was that no less than three of the worms who’d taken the bait at previous drop shafts followed me over and tried to attack me while I was making new ones. Killing them necessitated retrieving the scry beacons from their stomachs, a particularly gruesome job that I could thankfully perform with force magic and telekinesis.

With any luck, this plan would pay out soon. I’d been running the numbers for adapting the artificial resonance creation ritual, and things did not look good. It would take months of uninterrupted mana generation at minimum – time I didn’t have. A nice, fat chunk of moon core to ease my mana burdens might actually be the only way to pull this off unless the brakvaw proved to be exceptionally generous.

Maybe I could sell them the next batch of worm food. Did their societal model even have concepts for bartering and trade?

Eventually, I ran out of work to do, which meant I was also out of excuses to put off the next task on my list: talking to my family. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see them, it was that they weren’t going to like what I wanted to do. I could already picture the arguments, the good reasons they’d have to reject my suggestions. If I couldn’t convince them, I might have to override their autonomy in order to protect them.

I placed the lid on my stasis cube and shrunk it down so that it would fit in my hand. It was still made of solid stone and weighed more than two hundred pounds, but weight reduction enchantments had been easy enough to weave into its construction. The whole thing was a bit more mana hungry than I liked, reminding me once again how much I’d benefit from Querit figuring out how to apply lossless casting to enchantments and inscriptions.

Then I returned to the platform I’d installed down here and reached out mentally to feel the dozens of other platforms I’d scattered across the island in various towns and villages. Most of them weren’t hidden – they couldn’t be, since they were designed for other people to use them with only minimal understanding of how they functioned. New Alkerist had that type of platform, which was part of the problem. It’d be easy to find by anyone who could cast a teleportation spell manually, or just by locating any of the other platforms it was linked to.

I selected my destination and let the platforms bridge the connection, saving me the time and hassle of having to do it manually. With the spell ingrained into the stone via the complicated rune patterns carved there, it was so easy to teleport across a few hundred miles that a reasonably competent child could do it. The ones in town even had mana emitters built into the base for easy charging.

I appeared in New Alkerist right around sunset. Someone had tossed a few globes of light up in the fields, and I could see a steady stream of farmers making their way towards town. Somewhere out there was my father, presumably. I sharpened my eyes with a quick invocation to help me pick out details from the shadows while I scanned the fields, but didn’t see him.

Maybe he’d quit early today, or maybe he was working on the other side of town. It was easy enough to find him with a few divinations, which tracked him down at town hall. He looked equal parts frustrated and annoyed as he listened to two men argue, both of them attempting to drown the other’s words out by shouting over one another.

It seemed I’d arrived at the perfect time. A meeting with New Alkerist’s council was just what I needed, and it was a happy coincidence that it was happening on the night I showed up. Almost everybody I needed to talk to was already in one place, saving me the effort of tracking them down and dragging them all into one room. I quickly set off in that direction.

Every building in New Alkerist was built in the same style: smooth, solid stone magically transmuted and shaped by me. Its streets were smooth, wide, and dry. Enchantments worked to keep everything clean, including the water. Buildings were cooled to comfortable levels against the desert heat, and magical lighting, indoor plumbing, and cooking stoves were fixtures of every home.

Quite a bit of planning had gone into its construction to accommodate its need to grow as more and more people flocked to what was the most magically advanced society on the island – which, again, was the problem. New Alkerist had a bigger school than anywhere else, one that included mana control classes for adults to train them for their ignition rituals and casting novice- and basic-tier spells. Nowhere else was really doing anything like that.

It drew attention. Ammun’s followers had found me, but where would they go when the next group realized they couldn’t break the defenses surrounding my demesne? It wasn’t a huge leap of logic to assume that the magical center of the island would be connected to me in some way, that attacking it might draw me out, or at least give them some valuable hostages.

I walked into town hall to find six people looking at me from the councilman’s table and two men so engrossed in continuing their argument that they didn’t notice my arrival. My eyes were drawn to Father’s face, to that crease he got on his forehead when he was worried. He knew I avoided politics if possible, that this particular building was the last place in town I wanted to be. He probably thought I was here for him specifically, which meant he thought I had an urgent family issue.

In a way, he was right. My interest in protecting New Alkerist was based on my interest in protecting my family. If I could convince them to take a vacation in a hidden location for a few years until I got this whole Ammun thing sorted out, I wouldn’t care so much if the town got destroyed. It’d cost me some of my investments, but nothing irreplaceable.

Of course, my parents and siblings would be devastated that all of their friends were dead, so there were some drawbacks to any plan that involved abducting my family and abandoning everyone else to their fates. I’d call that my plan of last resort for now and start by proposing some less drastic solutions.

The two arguing farmers still hadn’t noticed that nobody was paying attention to them anymore. I took a moment to listen to the conversation—nothing more than an argument over property lines because one of them wanted to build a fence—then tossed a sphere of silence over them. The barrier effectively split sound so that they could continue fighting each other without bothering the rest of the room, while we could talk without having to shout to be heard over them.

“Praise the ancestors,” one of the councilmen said with a chuckle. He obviously hadn’t realized the seriousness of my presence here yet. “I know what spell I’ll be learning next.”

That got a few laughs around the table, but not from Father. If anything, his expression had grown even graver. “What happened?” he asked.

“My sanctum was attacked. Twenty-two enemy mages, including at least two who were capable of casting master-tier spells in their specific fields. I captured and interrogated one. They were sent by Ammun Nescect. I believe they found me by way of gathering rumors and information from local communities until they narrowed the location of the valley down.”

The two farmers realized nobody was listening to them at that point, or perhaps just that they couldn’t hear anything outside the bubble. One of them must have had enough of an ability to sense mana to realize there was a spell cast around them, because he burst out and started trying to yell, only to be stopped again by more targeted magic. This time a wave of paralysis hit him, causing him to slump down to the ground when his muscles grew too weak to hold him upright.

“What… What happened to the other mages?” the councilman at the far end of the table asked, ignoring the attempted interruption and looking faintly ill.

I gave him a flat stare and ignored the question. “I’ve sealed off the portal the intruders reached the island from, but that will only delay the next assault.”

“You think they’ll come here?” Father asked. Alarm rippled across the table, with half of them shooting anxious looks at me and the rest staring off into the distance with horror on their faces.

Six people governed New Alkerist. None of them were at stage two. That didn’t mean there weren’t a few more powerful mages floating around, but it reflected just how unprepared the town was to fight off a cabal of hostile mages. That was partially my fault, I supposed. They’d had years to prepare, to train and learn, and I could have shepherded them along that path. I’d devoted my time and energy elsewhere, leaving them vulnerable.

“There are too many signs pointing in this direction,” I said. “At some point, they’ll realize there are softer targets than attacking an archmage in his own demesne. When that happens, it won’t be hard to figure out where to go instead. New Alkerist is almost certainly going to be attacked by a hostile force of powerful mages in the near future.”

There was a second of stunned silence, then everyone broke out yelling at once.