Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 23

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First things first, I checked for more wards. It wouldn’t do to get caught in here after all. It only took a few moments, and I was sure that opening the door wouldn’t trigger any sort of alarms. The most common place to put such a trigger was a sort of trip line behind the door that would be broken by the very motion of the door itself moving. It was a weak but efficient style of warding, not good for preventing anyone from gaining entry, but excellent for letting someone else know.

This door didn’t have anything like that on it.

My hand hovered an inch over the door handle, but I didn’t grab hold of it. There were no magical wards, but what about mechanical traps? It would have to be something easily disarmed so that the Collectors could go in and out, if it existed at all. Or it would have to be something magical, keyed specifically to them as individuals or to a token they’d carry with them. If it was magical though, I’d be able to sense it.

I focused all my attention on that handle as I examined it. Traps were by their very nature designed to be hidden, even more so than normal wards. There could be one on the door, just waiting for someone to touch it in order to activate. I could practically feel the mana hidden in the spell, tingling just below my fingers.

Was there something there, or was my imagination getting the better of me? I was right outside the door of a storage room holding the most valuable thing in the village, and so far the only defense had been a simple lock on a wooden door that wouldn’t have kept out a determined thief willing to put a bit of muscle into breaking in. That couldn’t possibly be the only defense Noctra had for his draw stones.

Some wards were designed to go off without the person who’d tripped them realizing it, but I was confident that even if I’d stumbled over such a ward, I would have felt the magic activate. It was far easier to feel active mana than it was to detect dormant wards. So if there were going to be any defenses, then by process of elimination, this was the last reasonable spot to place them.

I hadn’t seen anything in my initial sweep, but I was still hesitant to touch the door. My fingers brushed the door handle, ever so gently, and then I felt it. Hidden away, waiting for someone to wrap their hands around the handle and turn it, was the trap. Turning the handle was the trigger, so as long as I didn’t do that, I was safe.

Now that I had a physical connection, I could see it clearly. It was surprisingly advanced compared to everything else I’d seen from Noctra. It seemed like most of his magic fell into the novice or basic categories, but this trap was at least of intermediate difficulty. It was subtle, too, not at all like I was starting to suspect his repertoire consisted of.

What was it he’d told my father? He has an assistant, an adept, who Father would be taking over harvesting the mana from the draw stones for. Iskara, or Perfidy, as Noctra had called her. There was nothing stopping anyone from learning magic as long as they could source the mana to practice. Adepts usually weren’t as skilled as mages for the simple reason that the first thing any master did upon taking an apprentice was to ignite their core, thus turning adepts into mages regularly.

But here, in this place, no one knew how to do that. It was entirely possible Iskara was a superior spell caster to Noctra, limited only by her inability to generate her own mana. Would it even matter with this whole scheme they had set up? The village was donating four to five times as much mana as Noctra could produce himself every day.

Regardless of who had cast it, I still needed to get through it. Fortunately for me, the hardest part of disabling any trap was finding it in the first place. After that, it only took a tiny bit of mana to break it. That was good, because a tiny bit was all I had left. What I needed here was basic mana control. There were spells to break traps, but by their very nature, they were inefficient. It wasn’t possible to create a spell that would work on every type of trap without some redundancies and wasted effort. Since I didn’t have that luxury, I was instead going to perform the equivalent of building a spell live as I explored the trap. It would be good for disarming this trap exactly and nothing else.

I probed the structure of the spell with my senses and sent tiny little strands of my mana into it. I could just lash out wildly and overcome it through sheer damage, and I’d probably be safe from any feedback, but ‘probably’ wasn’t good enough. I spent thirty seconds fully infiltrating the paralysis trap until I understood exactly how it was constructed, then I ripped the mana core right out of the enchantment and added its reserves to my own. No need to waste it. Extra mana was what I was here for, after all. I only got a sliver of the total spell, but it was still enough to recover a third of what I’d spent on one of those sleep spells.

I turned the handle and pushed the door open.

There was nothing but a rack filling the entire back wall and a work bench nearby. The rack had no less than sixty draw stones on it, far, far beyond what I’d expected to find. They were even organized with the fullest ones on the left and the empty ones all the way to the right.

I immediately went to the full side and emptied the draw stone’s internal reservoir. Pulling mana from it was a tricky and slow process without the appropriate tools, but my luck had run out when it came to the work desk being fully equipped. Tapping into a basic storage crystal was like opening a drawer and taking what I wanted. Mana crystals were even easier since in order to function properly, they had to be attuned to their users. Nobody else could use my mana crystal, but I would lose almost none of the mana that I moved back and forth and didn’t even need to deal with converting it from what was essentially a block of ambient mana to match my core.

Draw stones were more like playing with one of those finger holding puzzles that were given to children. I could pull, but the draw stone pulled back. Too little force and I wouldn’t get anywhere, too much and I’d break the puzzle. I had to use just the right amount of pressure to pull the mana back out, otherwise the draw stone would eat the very mana I was trying to take to reinforce its own hold on what was left.

All said and done, it took me about twenty seconds to completely fill my core. Every draw stone was a little bit different in how much pressure it took to tap into it, determined mostly by its size and density, in my experience, but most people who used them took pains to grind them down to a standard size. These weren’t exactly uniform, but they were all pretty close.

Most importantly, the draw stones on the full side each had enough mana to top me off twice. By my extremely rough calculations after a minute’s examination, I could refill my core forty-two times with the amount of mana in this room. I needed an hour to finish my mana crystal, then another trip to refill my core, half an hour to work the transmutation that would shrink it down to a portable size so I could bring it back, and then another half an hour of work to place the shielding on the crystal and drain the room dry.

Then it would be time to pay Noctra and his maybe-better-than-him adept assistant a visit. With this much mana immediately available to me, I would be able to toss around a few advanced spells and end any fight against them quickly. For the first time since Father had walked away with those two Garrison members, I felt some measure of confidence that I could win this.

With my core full of stolen mana, there was no more reason for me to be inside the Collectors’ headquarters. I closed the door behind me, snuck down the hallway, and exited the building. It had barely been five minutes since I’d gone in, and everything was still and silent.

Mother was awake and waiting for me in the garden when I got back. “How’d it go?” she asked when I came around the side of our hut and she spotted me.

“Perfect,” I said. “There’s enough mana there to finish my mana crystal, shrink it down to a portable size, and burst into the manor with spells firing from both hands if I need to. I just need to finish the prep work first.”

“And your father?”

I shook my head. “Haven’t checked. I’ll scry on him again as soon as I’m ready to go.”

I finished the mana crystal in just under an hour while Mother hovered nearby. She didn’t say anything, but I could feel the nervous energy roiling inside her. She wanted to move, to do something, but there was nothing she could do right now, nothing except wait and keep generating mana.

“It’s done,” I said, opening my eyes. The plain field stone I’d spent weeks perched on was now a shard of smooth, glittering crystal the same dark violet as the night sky above. Right now, it was empty, but as my mana filled it, it would look like the stars themselves were trapped inside.

“It’s beautiful,” Mother said softly.

“Just wait,” I told her with a smile. “It’ll get better. I need to go steal more mana. I’ll be back in a bit.”

She nodded, but didn’t take her eyes off my mana crystal. With a silent laugh and a shake of my head, I ran back out into the streets to the village square. It was even later now, and the red moon, Lasrin, sat lower in the western sky. The pale violet sliver of Taumar was just barely visible between the crests of two mountains to the north, a good omen if ever there was one.

My sleeping spell was still holding when I slipped back into the Collectors’ headquarters, and none of the others had woken during my absence. I quickly finished draining the draw stone I’d started on the first time, then grabbed the next one in line and started on that. Once my core was full to bursting again, I snuck back out and returned to the garden.

“Next step,” I told Mother. “Making this small enough to carry.”

Stone shape wasn’t really designed for what I was using it for, but it would work in a pinch. The spell cost me a little over a quarter of my mana normally, but since I was using it on a mana crystal instead of a random rock, it was almost twice as expensive. I cast it slowly over the next minute, and the crystal shrunk down until it was small enough to fit in my hand.

Unfortunately, the spell didn’t change the weight. I now had a hyper dense mana crystal able to hold two hundred times as much mana as my own core, and it still weighed at least fifty pounds. I could fix that too, but it was going to cost me the rest of my mana to do so. The spell was called gravity twist, and its effect was simple: make things lighter or heavier. Like all enchantments, it required me to create an artificial core of mana to serve as a power source, but in this case, I was modifying it to draw its mana from the crystal itself.

If my mana crystal was ever drawn completely dry, the enchantment would break and it would immediately return to its normal weight. As long as the spell was active, though, it would weigh about half a pound. As soon as I was done casting it, I reached down and picked up the crystal. It had one solitary flickering light in its depth, a star about to burn out.

“It’s ready?” Mother asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “One last trip to the draw stones to fill it full of mana before the weight reducing enchantment starves and breaks. If that happens, I won’t be able to move it. Next time I come back, we’ll check on Father, I promise.”

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