Keiran

When I’d first traveled to Derro, it was with the intention of breaking a cabal known as the Wolf Pack. They’d managed to set up a system where they were harvesting mana from tens of thousands of people all over the island, with agents installed in practically every village and town. Even Derro itself was using leech stones as currency, draining people of their mana just by handling them.

A significant portion of that had gone to their leader, Monarch, who was already several hundred years old and no longer able to produce the mana she needed to support her life extending invocations without outside assistance. I might have had some sympathy for her, considering I’d been in a similar state myself at the end of my previous life, except she’d tried to kill me a few times. That tended to dull any warm feelings I might have for a person.

I’d dismantled her cabal, killing most of the core members. A few had lived through the process, including Tetrin, who I’d personally recruited with the promise of more mana, a fully stocked workshop, and tutoring in the old ways of enchanting and inscription. His skills had risen dramatically over the last half a decade and he’d even managed to bring his mana core up from stage two to three a year back.

Two other cabal members who’d survived but stayed in Derro were Keeper, who cared only for her library and expanding on it, and Zara, who’d been a sort of brain-washed hostage meant to ensure the cooperation of her father, the nominal leader of the city. The price for his help in reaching Monarch was the safe return of his daughter, not necessarily an easy task since she was an active, hostile combatant at the time.

Seeing her sitting here in New Alkerist was a bit of a surprise. During my infrequent visits to Derro, I’d never caught so much as a glimpse of her. I’d been told they had a lot of work to do on her, not because Monarch had used mental magic to manipulate her mind and personality, but just because she’d been raised from childhood to be a member of the Wolf Pack, groomed to work as Monarch’s personal seer.

I was unclear whether Zara was grateful to be rescued and reunited with her father or bitter at having her cabal destroyed. Considering how she’d spent almost her entire life working with those people and probably considered some of them like family, I was leaning toward the latter.

I entered the tavern and crossed the room, waving off the barmaid with a single gesture when she started to follow me over. Zara glanced up at me, but her eyes betrayed no recognition. That didn’t surprise me. I had looked like a four-year-old child the last time she’d seen me, and aged close to twenty years in the span of just six.

“Hello, Zara,” I said as I pulled out the chair opposite of her and sat down at the table.

“H-hi,” she said.

“You’re a bit more timid than I remember.”

“‘Than you remember…’” she repeated. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

“I’m the person you came here to talk to,” I said.

Zara raised an eyebrow and made a show of looking over the side of the table at my legs. “Huh, well, you don’t appear to be a child on stilts, so I guess my response to that would be, ‘I have questions.’”

“I needed an adult body to maximize the size of my mana core before I could advance to stage three and didn’t want to wait an extra decade, so I sped up the process,” I explained.

“I… was not aware that was a possibility.”

“It wasn’t cheap. But we’re not here to discuss me. You said you needed to talk to me.”

“Yes. I need help. Well, Derro needs help, but I’m responsible for it, so…”

“Help with what?” I asked.

“Are you aware of the project we’ve been working on for the last few years?”

“You mean the city restoration?”

“It’s been slow going. There were a lot of objections from the inner city, mostly claims that the funds should be allocated there first. Father lost his temper a few times.” Zara smiled to herself there. “Many of the nobles found themselves stripped of titles and lands, not coincidentally the ones who’d worked the hardest to undermine him when Monarch first rose to power.”

“People in power rarely want to give it up and never appreciate what they consider to be rightfully theirs being diverted to the impoverished,” I said.

I hadn’t dug into the motivations behind the Hierophant’s decision to begin restoring Derro, mostly because I wasn’t concerned about it. The city existed in the middle of a desert and relied on outlying farm villages powered mostly by magic to produce food. It could easily house a hundred times more people than it currently had, and greater than half of the city was nothing but ruins. There wasn’t much reason to live there at all, as far as I was concerned.

Zara didn’t argue my point with me. “Regardless, the restoration has been proceeding at a sustainable pace and quite a few mages in the city have begun picking up transmutation skills to participate. Everything was going fine until a few weeks ago.”

“What happened then?”

“You are aware of my father’s abilities?”

“And yours,” I said. Her family practiced a difficult form of divination that tried to peer through time instead of across space.

“We started having visions of floods of refugees filling the cities, thousands and thousands of them. If it comes to pass as we’ve foreseen, not only will we have far too little space to house them, but food will almost immediately become a major issue.”

“The refugees are already starting to appear,” I told her. “We had a whole town show up in boats and start moving through the teleportation network not two months ago.”

“It must be a different group,” she said. “They never came to Derro.”

“No, they ended up here. We helped them.”

“Did they say why they were fleeing their homes? We haven’t been able to divine the cause of all this.”

That didn’t surprise me. Ammun kept anti-scrying wards up, ones powerful enough to block even temporal divination. Most likely, he maintained the expensive defenses to prevent me from doing exactly what Zara and her father had tried to do, and for much the same reason I was powering the same wards against him.

That protection only extended so far. Ammun himself might as well not exist as far as Zara’s magic was concerned, and it would probably block her from seeing the direct results of his actions, but things rippled out and eventually the wards couldn’t shield the effects from being seen, especially when it was something that affected an entire continent. So she was seeing potential futures of refugees coming to Derro, but lacked the skill to trace it back any farther.

“An army of mages is claiming a huge chunk of land a few thousand miles west of here and making probing strikes past their new border,” I said. “I suspect they’re going to continue to expand as far as they can.”

Zara was understandably alarmed at the news, but I brushed past it and said, “You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”

“A couple reasons. One was to see if you could help us figure out what was going on, but I suppose you already knew. Another was to see about recruiting you to speed up the restoration of the city, though I can see from the look on your face that you’re not interested. Finally, I have a message for you from Keeper. She said she found something in the archives she wants you to look at, nothing urgent, but intriguing enough that she’d like your opinion.”

“Did she say what she found?” I asked.

“Some kind of record for ancient city infrastructure. We can’t figure out what most of the equipment is for, not from the diagrams at least. Hopefully, it’ll be something useful, but we’ve been getting along without it for hundreds of years, so a few more weeks won’t change much.”

There were any number of old devices that could be, though if it was important enough to make it into the ancient city records, it was probably something big and powerful. Given the state of Derro as little more than an old desert ruin that had been steadily filling with more and more sand when I’d found it, I doubted there was anything functional left there.

“I guess I could make a trip to Derro,” I said. It wasn’t like I had much better to do besides experiment and hope to stumble across a way to create an artificial resonance point.

“Keeper will be delighted to hear it,” Zara said dryly. “I don’t suppose there’s a chance you’d help with the restoration while you’re there?”

“I’m not really interested. Maybe you should ask Tetrin. His rates are steep, but he does good work.”

“I actually already did,” she admitted. “He turned me down, said he was busy working on a project.”

Knowing Tetrin, that could be any number of things. He hadn’t gotten in contact with me, so it was either something he already knew how to do or something he was trying to work out for himself. For as many things as I’d taught him over the years, he did have a love for tinkering and occasionally got an idea that he was hellbent on putting together without any assistance.

“I guess that’s that, then. I’m going to go see what Keeper wants. You can come with me if you want to save the cost of a teleportation spell.”

Zara gave me a strange look and said, “You know, you’re not really much like what I expected you to be.”

“Oh? What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know. Someone grimmer, I supposed. Darker, maybe.”

“Perhaps I made a bad first impression on you. We were on opposite sides then.”

Zara flinched at that, but didn’t deny it. The first time she’d seen me, it was through a temporal divination reviewing a battle I’d had with the Wolf Pack’s resident alchemist and flesh crafter. I’d killed him and his menagerie of mutated monsters. Then I’d proceeded to systematically destroy mage after mage until I’d slaughtered almost the entire inner circle of the Wolf Pack.

It was no wonder Zara hadn’t wanted to get anywhere near me. Her forecasts about the refugee problem must have worried her immensely to get her to overcome that fear and seek me out. Maybe I should do a bit of temporal divining of my own. I wouldn’t get close to Ammun and the cost was ridiculously expensive for what was unreliable information, but with my demesne fully bonded, I could afford to take a few stabs at fishing for something useful.

That would be a project for later. I stood up from the table and escorted Zara to the teleportation platform. “These things,” she said softly. “It’s probably for the best that you didn’t bring this magic back until after Monarch was dead. I can’t imagine much good coming from her gaining access to them.”

I wisely didn’t remind Zara how much she’d personally benefited from Monarch’s rule or how little she’d seemed to care about the commoners exploited and left for dead at the time. Whether this change of heart she was going through was genuine or not, I’d be doing myself no favors needling her over it. That didn’t mean I was going to trust her, though. She hadn’t switched sides willingly.

Putting a platform in Derro had been a decision made by the merchant’s council, a coalition of trading leaders hailing from different villages across the island. I wasn’t in favor of it, but they’d requested it and if I’d wanted to overrule their decisions, I’d have put myself in charge. Since I didn’t fancy myself a king, Derro had gotten a platform.

It saved me a bit of work now, at least. I activated New Alkerist’s platform and we disappeared, reforming an instant later and several hundred miles away.