Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 45

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I started by doing a quick lap around the manor. There were six alarm wards and two more trapped doors, both of which I marked for further investigation. I’d come back and see what was behind them as soon as I finished my initial circuit.

The manor was, for the most part, a big, long rectangle made up of connected rooms. There were exceptions, like the servants’ hall and the governor’s loop at the end, but the majority of the layout was room after room. There were several small rooms that sat in the middle of the rectangle with no exterior wall and thus no windows to brighten them up, but now that I was no longer worried about being discovered, a simple light spell, usable by any novice, lit the way for me.

Most of the manor was about as interesting as I expected it to be. Large parts weren’t in use and were sealed off to collect dust, especially the west side of the building where most of the space had been devoted to public works. From the looks of it, Noctra hadn’t had much of an interest in that. After I’d confirmed my mental map and filled in the spaces I hadn’t dared scry into previously, I returned to the trapped rooms.

First up was Noctra’s suite. I was operating under the logic that he’d keep the most valuable and sensitive objects nearby, and the most potentially dangerous safely locked away in specially prepared chambers, though at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if his labs had no reinforcements at all. Nothing else seemed to. A proper mage, Noctra was not.

A simple unlock granted me access to the suite and I sent my little ball of light ahead as I opened the door. It swooped into the center of the room and I paused, unsure exactly what I was seeing. There was a bed, unused. That made sense, considering where I’d found Noctra. A small and somewhat ragged cloth doll sat there, perched on one of the pillows.

Next to that was a small vanity with a circular mirror. Several cases sat organized on its surface, and it had no less than three drawers built into it. That wasn’t a piece of furniture I typically associated with men, but perhaps Noctra simply enjoyed cosmetics as a hobby. He’d hardly be the first man I met who did. It was hard to reconcile that with the man I’d seen in my scrying, let alone with the state of his corpse in the other room. I was no expert on the finer arts of makeup, but I didn’t think he’d been wearing any.

By the time I found the dresses hanging in the closet, I was starting to think I’d come into this room under a mistaken impression. Noctra hadn’t been a big man by any means, but there was no way he could possibly fit into any of those clothes. The simplest explanation for that was that this wasn’t Noctra’s suite. It was Iskara’s.

This was without a doubt the master suite of the manor. There were other rooms, but they were all far smaller and lacked the connected closet and personal lavatory. There was even a private office accessible via a door on the south wall. That one was locked too, but I forced it open easily enough.

The inescapable conclusion was that Iskara had the master suite, and Noctra lived and slept elsewhere. That painted their relationship in a very different light, and as I thought back to the conversation I’d spied on between the two of them, I became even more sure that I was on the right trail now.

Noctra was here to work off some kind of debt to a cabal. He’d presumably been stripped of his rank and lost the right to his codename, Nocturne, when he’d been banished to Alkerist. Iskara had come with him, not to assist him, but to oversee his work. That was probably why she personally handled the draw stones. She was the one who was keeping track of how much mana the whole operation provided because she was the one in good standing with their cabal back home and she didn’t want him skimming off the top.

The draw stones were probably also her responsibility. There was an awful lot of it in one place, especially a place so otherwise poor. They probably belonged to the cabal and were here on loan to assist with their tithing scam. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I’d just assumed the relationship because Noctra was a mage and Iskara was an adept, but I should have known better.

She was his taskmaster. With her dead, he could very well have panicked the first time he tried to scry her or communicate. Whether he realized I’d killed her, or more likely thought that Father had done it, or that someone from this cabal had come after her, he’d seen the writing on the wall.

The man was a coward as well as a con artist. Rather than make an attempt to defend himself, he’d hid himself away and started working through his stashed liquor. I was vaguely annoyed that as low of him as my opinion had been, the reality had turned out to be even worse.

Other than confirming the owner of the suite, the only room of interest was Iskara’s office. There was a box in there, locked of course, that had been designed with about fifty compartments full of storage crystals. It made sense, in a way. The mana was destined to go to Derro, and they needed to get it there somehow. Draw stones were by their very nature too big and heavy to conveniently move around, and I’d already known that Iskara was draining them here in the village.

This then was where all the mana was going. About a third of the storage crystals were full, but all of them were extremely low quality. Part of me itched to take the mana from them, but they’d serve as evidence of what Noctra and Iskara had been up to.

While it would have been convenient to find some letters or a personal journal detailing all their dastardly deeds, no such evidence existed. Presumably, Iskara hadn’t been a total idiot and any correspondence like that she had received had been promptly destroyed. There were various tools for transferring mana around, including a channeling lock used to lessen the transference loss when using a storage crystal. One of those would have been nice to have had eight months ago.

Once everything was cleared up, I was going to claim this office-turned-workshop and refine or replace the tools to bring them up to something approaching my standards. This would be an excellent place to start working on my lattice. The design I had in mind was going to be somewhat modular to account for the natural growth of my mana core over the next twelve to fourteen years, which would cause some inefficiencies in the long run. I’d be able to rebuild it properly later, and in the short term, I’d enjoy a vastly increased rate of mana generation.

Hidden away in her desk was a ledger, one that I assumed was keeping track of how much mana she’d stolen from the villagers and how much was left after being pulled from the draw stone into her little set up in here. When I opened the book, however, I found myself in for a rude surprise.

I couldn’t read this language.

It was ridiculous. I spoke it just fine. Sure, I’d had to use Gravin’s memories merged with mine to adjust for the regional variances, but it hadn’t been an issue. Somehow, they were using an entirely different alphabet, one that I’d never come across before. Once again, the disturbing question of where exactly I’d been reborn reared its ugly head.

I was definitely still on Manoch. Of that much, I was certain. It was a part I’d never been to or even heard of before, but there couldn’t possibly be another world with one of the same languages I’d learned back home. Even if there was, it didn’t matter. I’d reviewed the soul invocations after I’d awakened again and confirmed they were working correctly. I was still on the same world I’d left. Somewhere out there, my sanctum in the Night Vale was waiting for me to return to it.

The only reasonable explanation was that this book was not written in Enotian. I couldn’t picture a way that an entire language would have its alphabet replaced, so Iskara must have instead been bilingual and filled out her ledger in another language. Alternatively, the whole thing could be some sort of cipher using made up symbols that no one but her would know. That seemed like a lot of work to go through for a simple ledger though, especially with all the other tools serving as evidence of exactly what had been happening inside this work room.

There were spells to translate unfamiliar languages, though they could easily fail to crack coded messages. That would be a project for another day, once I’d solved my mana issues permanently. There was probably something important in there, but unless I failed to find any evidence at all of Noctra and Iskara’s guilt, I wasn’t going to waste my time and mana trying to translate it.

The very next room I stopped in was a small study. It had a single desk with a chair behind it and two more of those over-stuffed chairs that I’d found Noctra sleeping in in either corner of the room. Behind the desk was a shelf lined with cubby holes for various scrolls. At the top was a small row of books, no more than ten.

I used minor telekinesis to pull the first one down and frowned at it. The more I flipped through it, the deeper my frown got. This book appeared to be written in a foreign language as well. So was the next one, and the one after that. By now I recognized many of the symbols, even if I didn’t know what they meant. It still might not mean anything. Noctra and Iskara had come from somewhere else. Perhaps they’d brought books with them that were written in the dominant language of wherever they’d lived before.

I checked the rest of the books anyway and several of the scrolls. Everything appeared to be written in a language I couldn’t read. If this was how it was going to be, I would have to consider reorganizing my priorities to push learning whatever tongue this was to the top.

It wasn’t all a waste of time. One of the scrolls revealed a map when I unfurled it. It displayed an island, circular and ringed with mountains except for one spot near the northern tip. There were five towns on it, and the map made it clear that the entire island was one with very little rainfall. Even being unable to read the labels, I felt confident that I was looking at the place I was living on. Alkerist had to be one of the three villages on the east side, tucked away in the mountains, which probably made Derro the bigger town in the center of the flatlands in the middle.

I didn’t recognize the shape of the island, and unfortunately, the map didn’t display anything else. I still didn’t know where I was, but it was nice to have an idea of how to leave this place and hopefully get out of this mana desert. West, then north.

I continued my exploration of the warded rooms and found mostly what I’d expected. There was a room that was being used as storage for various mana tools and included a workbench to repair them. There were three more bedrooms, one of which showed signs that it might have belonged to Noctra despite him not having been sleeping in it.

And in the center of the house, behind a locked door, was a room with a dozen different books left open and scattered across the floor. Stone carving chisels and files were pushed into the corner like so much debris and refuse, all of it centered around a single pedestal with a top about two feet wide.

Set on top of that, looking like nothing so much as a fang of blue granite with a series of cracks running through it, was a ward stone bigger than I was.

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