Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 43

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I did not have the luxury to explore all night. If nothing else, it was significantly darker inside the manor than it had been outside, requiring me to expend a steady stream of mana to maintain sharpened senses just so I could see. I had a decent idea of where I needed to go already, thanks to my scrying efforts, but it was going to be slow going since I needed to check for wards in every room and at every doorway.

My goal was a hallway on the east side of the manor. It had four doors on the west wall and three more on the east, and my first thought was that those were living quarters for the family of the governor. Theoretically, they’d have been refurbished into libraries, offices, and studies. Judging by the spacing, the center door in the east wall would be the master suite where Noctra was currently sleeping.

To get there from my current location, I needed to pass through a dining room and a parlor to access what I assumed was supposed to be the servants’ quarters. In addition to a dozen rooms so small they could barely fit a bed, there was a laundry room and a pantry there. I’d seen no sign of anyone living in that section of the house, which just reinforced my belief that Noctra lived here alone in order to conduct his experiments in private.

There was a main hallway that bisected the manor, but my reason for avoiding it was simple: it had no less than three doors separating different sections of the house. By contrast, the servants’ quarters had only a single door separating it from the hallway I suspected contained the master suite and I’d spotted the key for it hanging from a hook just inside the pantry. Noctra probably didn’t know about that and, as security conscious as he was, I doubted he’d be happy to find out that the servants were not only circumventing all his locks, but they’d left the key to the one door that did separate him from them lying out.

People, as always, were the weakest link in any security system. If they needed access to anything on a regular basis, it was a sure bet that someone somewhere was circumventing a protocol or defense in the name of convenience. And since servants needed to go practically everywhere, it was generally a safe bet to start looking at them when breaking into a place one wasn’t supposed to be.

I made my way through the kitchen to the dining room and paused at the threshold to check for any wards or traps. Here at least, there was nothing, but that didn’t mean I could afford to be careless. The dining room itself lacked any exterior windows, and I was left with memories of my scrying to get through without tripping over anything. I turned right and followed the wall, one hand trailing it lightly until I came to the small servant’s cart stationed in the corner. That was my signal to skip four feet of wall where a display cabinet of ceramic dishes stood, then proceed another ten feet to the doorway leading to the parlor.

Once again, I paused to search for traps and, once again, there were none. Had I been breaking into a mage’s home back in my old life, I would have suspected I was walking into a trap at this point. It was criminally easy to ward a home and power it with ambient mana to anyone who’d reached the status of full mage. Not finding them in areas that were heavily trafficked by the servant staff was one thing. Not finding any at all was something else.

The logical answer was, as always, that living in an area with no ambient mana required a mage to make sacrifices. No matter how many times I encountered it, it left a bad taste in my mouth. Whatever had happened here must have been horrific to leave scars in the world so deep that they still hadn’t healed after generations.

I needed to confirm for myself how wide this mana desert was. If I only needed to travel twenty or thirty miles to escape it, I’d leave tomorrow morning. But what little conversation I’d overheard about Derro made me think it was more widespread than that. Noctra was making regular shipments of mana to associates there, which meant that at the very least, it was in the same situation as Alkerist.

I needed maps and history books. I’d never heard of a mana desert this big in my previous life, and it seemed like something I would have known about. Wherever I was, it was considerably hotter than it had been in the Night Vale, so I could make some assumptions about being much farther south than I’d been in my previous life. This area wasn’t quite a literal desert, but it wasn’t far off. Trees were scarce. Livestock was practically nonexistent, and there wasn’t much in the way of plants to feed them anyway. What food we did grow here was the result of hard work and spending mana.

Water was abundant, strangely enough. There was enough at least that the village had a communal well and no rules about rationing it. If I didn’t know any better, I would have suspected some magic in play there. But no, it was just another mystery to throw on the pile. Hopefully Noctra’s library would give me some answers.

I made a brief stop in the pantry to swipe the key there, then crept down the hallway, ears straining for the sound of anybody up and moving near me. I already knew the servant rooms were deserted. It didn’t look like they were ever used except as storage, despite being kept clean. Whichever villagers came to the manor every day to work, they went home to their huts nestled together in the village proper in the evenings.

When I got to the door at the far end of the hall, I stopped and gave it the same careful examination I’d given to the one leading into the manor. If there was any door that Noctra was going to spend some effort on, it was this one. I was expecting some wards that could only be bypassed by use of the proper key at minimum, possibly even wards that required individual attunements with only certain staff members allowed beyond the door. A few traps wouldn’t have surprised me either.

I examined the handle. Nothing. I looked at the hinges. Blank. I peered up and down the door frame, even going so far as to spend some extra mana to sharpen my eyes so I could look at the top. As far as I could tell, this was in every way a normal door, remarkable only in that it was made of wood, which was in scarce supply outside of the manor.

There was no way the man was this lax about his interior security. He’d put a paralysis trap on a servant’s entry door! Well, he’d had Iskara do it anyway. That was not the kind of precaution a man who didn’t value his privacy took. I’d been expecting traps on every door and wards in every room. Maybe I’d just expected him to spend too much mana on magical defenses.

Or maybe he hadn’t done it because he couldn’t. Maybe Iskara was the only one who knew how to cast the spells. Functionally speaking, she wasn’t at much more of a disadvantage than Noctra was here. Adepts generally relied far more heavily on ambient mana than mages did, but in this case, they were both functioning off the backs of the villagers themselves. It was entirely possible that the reason there were no traps or wards anywhere was that Iskara wasn’t here to renew them.

But if that was true, why was there still a paralysis trap on the door I’d come in through?

Things weren’t adding up, and considering I was breaking into the man’s house right now, I didn’t like the mystery of it all. Was he incompetent or was he incapable? At this point, I had to question every assumption I’d ever made about Noctra. Was he even a mage?

I’d felt his mana when he’d killed that mana sniffer, and I’d seen him cast a spell through a wand to make my father fall asleep. The enslavement spell on Nermet was also tied back to Noctra. Whatever else he might be, he was at least able to cast spells. But what if I’d been wrong about him being a mage? What if he was an adept, just like Iskara?

It didn’t matter much in this scenario. Mage or adept, I already had a good grasp of his skill level, and if it came down to a fight, I had to assume he had more than enough mana due to his stockpiles from the village. Any spell battle we fought wouldn’t last more than four or five spells anyway. If I did everything right, the battle would begin and end with a single spell: mine.

First, I needed to find Noctra, and this door was in my way. I inserted the key, twisted it, and turned the handle. The door swung in about two inches before I grabbed it and pulled it to a stop. There, a half foot up from the floor, was a ward line that I could only just barely see the edge of. I hadn’t sensed it during my examination of the door because it hadn’t actually been attached to the door itself.

This was far more nerve-wracking than I’d expected it to be. Normally, I’d be casting all sorts of divinations to spot this kind of stuff before I ever made a move. I probably wouldn’t even bother to show up in person unless my opponent was another archmage. Right now, I had none of my safety nets, and it had been over a thousand years since I’d been so vulnerable. I could remember the fear I’d felt during some of my first close brushes with death, the knowledge that the line between my life and death had come down to just one decision being made the other way, one step taken slightly differently.

That’s what I was feeling now, except it was all the more galling because the enemy mage was a man I had absolutely no respect for. His spellcraft was laughable. And he could still kill me, as weak as I was. Now was no time to be stingy with my mana, but I couldn’t maintain a fraction of my normal defenses for even ten seconds before I ran dry. If I wanted to have enough mana to fight with, I would have to rely on my reflexes to bring a shield to bear if I needed it.

And I was relying on luck and caution to sense traps like this ward line. Now that I knew it was there, I could disable it, but there was no guarantee that the mere act of disrupting the ward wouldn’t alert Noctra. This could very well be my last chance to move about undetected, and I’d feel a lot better about that if I knew for sure where Noctra was.

The ward itself might give me some desperately needed clues. By examining it, I could get an idea of what style of ward scheme the manor had, and, more importantly, whether they were sensitive to scrying. Being able to scry out all the areas in the house I hadn’t touched before would be hugely beneficial.

I looked it over and felt the tension drain out of me. It was a simple alarm ward, designed to activate if anyone walked through it. In this case, it would trigger when the door opened far enough to touch it, which I’d almost done inadvertently before spotting the ward line. I could suppress it long enough to get through without it activating, and with no chance of warning the caster by breaking it.

It wasn’t definitive proof that I could safely scry the rest of the manor, but it was an obstacle I could easily overcome so that I could continue my search. I got to work, and within thirty seconds, I’d redirected the ward line to scan across the ceiling, well above the door’s clearance, and passed beneath it into the hallway.

Now, I just needed to see if my guess about Noctra’s bedroom suite being behind the center door was correct.

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