Keiran

I spent two weeks flying around the edges of the old Ralvost Empire placing scrying beacons anywhere and everywhere. Some might be found, but I went out of my way to make the objects they were attached to unobtrusive and to shield them from casual detection. If Ammun himself randomly stumbled across one, I doubted he’d be fooled, but I figured my efforts were too sophisticated for the rank-and-file shock troops marching through the countryside to see through.

I also made a point to interview the refugees from various small towns I came across, often adopting different personalities and disguising myself, even going so far as to encourage people to forget they ever met me. The stories were similar, usually that of a smaller group coming to make demands followed by a larger group to see the threats through if the village didn’t give in. Since those demands were often so unreasonable that to agree to them would result in mass starvation, it was the rare town that wasn’t attacked and razed to the ground.

It wasn’t until my third week of skirting around the edges of Ammun’s territory, still far enough away from his tower to be safe, that I encountered the army itself. There were over a thousand of them in the kind of magic-crafted fortified bunkers I vaguely remembered armies using in my past life. It was all earthwork ramparts and barracks, with support buildings laid out in neat, disciplined rows.

If anything, I was a little surprised by how orderly it was. The army couldn’t have had that much practice given how long they’d existed. I wasn’t impressed, however. Neat rows were all they had going for them. Real mage armies would have covered their camp in wards designed to prevent scrying and detect intruders. This one didn’t even have basic vermin repellents to keep rats and bugs out of their food stores.

I levitated a few thousand feet in the air under a shroud of invisibility and stared down at the camp while my scrying spells roamed about, unimpeded. They were definitely tower mages, most either with stage one or two cores. I saw an officer here and there with a stage three, but nobody higher than that. The commander’s cabin was hidden amongst the other officers’, a popular strategy from my time to make it harder for assassins to find them.

That was the only part they got right, however. The mere fact that the square stone building was doubling as a command center made it trivially easy to pick out. Any competent assassin would have recognized its strategic importance immediately and quickly realized that the guy in charge also had his living quarters in the same building.

Luckily for him, I wasn’t here to assassinate anybody. I just wanted to snoop through their records to find out where they were from, where they were going, and what they were planning on doing once they got there. These types of camps were designed to be temporary, set up only if an army was going to be in the area for a few weeks while they worked through an objective before packing up and moving again.

Unfortunately, while it was possible for me to use a combination of scrying and long-range telekinesis to rifle through their records, it wasn’t possible to do it without someone noticing, mostly because there was no separate records room from the office. There was always at least one person in there, even if it was just a secretary. Usually, it was two to five people.

With hours to kill until it got dark and people started going to sleep, I had nothing better to do than fly wide circles around the area, dropping new scrying beacons as I went and hoping to stumble across anything interesting. My luck was poor, however, and I ended up wasting the second half of the day just waiting for my chance to get a closer look at what was going on.

* * *

It was after midnight, as dark as it was going to get with three partial moons in the sky above me. The vast majority of the army mages were sleeping now, with only the sentries standing guard. The commander was still awake in his quarters, but was showing no signs of leaving and he’d already dismissed his aide for the night. I wasn’t likely to get clearer access to those files than right now.

It was trivial to bypass the patrols, the walls, and the few wards they’d actually bothered to enact around the commander’s cabin itself. Apparently, these mages were so used to the tower providing endless mana for them—not to mention so many wards being built right into the framework of their homes—that they had no idea how to make them last without drawing on ambient energy. The ones they did have were actually being actively powered by a mage doing nothing but standing there and keeping it running.

It made me feel somewhat embarrassed to be threatened by Ammun’s forces, but quantity was a quality all its own, unfortunately.

Invisible and silent, I landed on the roof of the command center and used phantasmal step to slip inside. For the next half an hour, I proceeded to ransack the place for every last scrap of information I could find – everything from troop deployments to relief schedules to supply logistics. I was no tactician, but all put together, it painted a grim picture. Whatever Ammun was doing, he wanted everyone out of the land around his tower.

Probably the most interesting thing I discovered was the shipment of raw materials, their exact quantity and composition unlisted, passing through the area to some mysterious site, destination unknown. The only reason the army even knew of its existence was to know to stay away from it. Whatever was in that supply caravan, Ammun didn’t even want the normal soldiers to catch sight of it.

Patrol schedules had been altered to leave a gap for the caravan to pass through with only the top executives of this base knowing about the holes deliberately opened in their defenses. Three times in their paperwork, I found caravans had passed out of old Ralvost’s territory into the world beyond, all with no records of destination or cargo.

Now that was something worth looking into. Ammun was obviously building something secret, but why did it need to be so far from the tower? Or was it even him doing it? Perhaps some of his higher ups were chafing at life under his rule and were trying to carve out a spot of independence far enough away that he couldn’t interfere.

I wouldn’t know until I found the place, and that could be a lengthy project. Even at my speed and with my divination skills, searching hundreds or thousands of square miles for a base that was probably far better hidden than this one was no easy task. If only there were some clues as to where the caravans were going, I’d have a place to start.

I wasn’t going to find that in the paperwork. I might find it in the minds of some of the top officers here if I cared to look, but those were the types of people that I’d have little luck casually reading their thoughts, and certainly not without them noticing. That wouldn’t be necessary, thankfully. I just needed a little patience.

I knew the route the caravans took. I just needed to drop some scrying beacons with proximity wards attached to them to let me know the next time one came through, then follow it to its destination. It might take a few weeks before it happened, but this way, I’d find out about it without anyone ever knowing I’d been here.

There were risks, of course. It was possible there wouldn’t be a fourth caravan, that they’d complete whatever they were working on with the materials they had on hand. It could be that I’d lose my one and only chance if I didn’t act now. It was equally possible that by kidnapping and interrogating a bunch of officers here, I’d reveal my presence and make it impossible to accomplish anything substantial.

Either way was a risk, but I was more inclined to take the one that didn’t have a good chance of getting me caught. Ammun still had hunters out there looking for me specifically, and I did not need them getting a fresh trail to follow while I worked.

So I put everything back as close to the way I’d found it as I could. Enough people handled these files that if anything was slightly out of place, whoever noticed would just think someone else had moved it. Then I did one last sweep with divination magic to make sure I wasn’t missing anything or anyone who might have spotted me through my invisibility, confirmed the commander was still working in his private quarters, and left the base.

* * *

Eventually I had to give up on my recon mission. I’d confirmed that Ammun had tens of thousands of mages on the move, that he was pushing everyone out of the villages and towns that had sprung up in the intervening millennium since he’d vanished, and that he was sending troops out to the borders to patrol them, presumably to hold that land.

My best guess was that he simply planned on reestablishing his empire, though why he was pushing out the villages already there instead of incorporating them remained a mystery, as did his secret project beyond the edge of his borders. I had some theories—things like an advanced scrying station seemed likely—but I wasn’t sure why that would need to be secret or beyond his established defensive line – again, unless it wasn’t Ammun’s project at all.

Feeling frustrated with the whole thing, I returned to my demesne to continue working on my own projects. Building a mana resonance point manually was going to border on impossible, but I was utterly convinced any wild ones had collapsed long, long ago. If I couldn’t figure out a way to do it myself, I was never going to make it past stage six.

In a way, it was almost a relief when a messenger showed up in New Alkerist asking for me. I’d been doing nothing but going in circles for close to a month, no closer to solving a single problem than I was when I’d started. Sure, I’d started rebuilding some of the specialty tools and rooms that were essential to a researcher’s work, but I’d only done so because I couldn’t find a better avenue to direct my efforts down.

I teleported immediately, surprising my mother, who was still standing in front of the scrying mirror in my room. “Oh!” she yelped in surprise as she flinched away. “I wasn’t expecting you to just pop over like that.”

“I was looking for a reason to take a break,” I said. “This is as good as any. Who’s this messenger and what do they want?”

“She’s at the tavern,” Mother said. “And she didn’t say, just that it was important and time-sensitive.”

“Anyone with her?”

“Not that we saw. I didn’t talk to her personally. One of the serving girls ran the message over to us.”

I nodded and cast a quick scrying spell. It zipped across town, slipping through the privacy wards on the tavern without issue, and gave me a good look at the floor. The place wasn’t busy this time of day, but there were three people there. The first was the bartender, one of three who rotated shifts. The second was one of the orphan crew that had come in with Juby, a girl perhaps twelve or thirteen years old now.

The third was someone I vaguely recognized. It took me a moment to place her face since it had been years since I’d seen her. Perhaps if she hadn’t been so tired and ragged looking, I would have gotten it quicker.

“Ah… That’s probably serious,” I said. “It looks like the Hierophant’s sent his daughter all the way from Derro to see me, and with no escort either.”