Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 48

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One thing I’d learned over the years was that the more moving parts a plan had, the more attention I had to give it to make sure that those parts were going in the direction I wanted, at the time I wanted them to move. Simple plans were better, but not always practical. My plan here had a few holes in it. For example, I didn’t know if Cherok would actually know enough about magic to identify anything in Noctra’s manor. For another, there was no guarantee he could read whatever language those books were in. But he was the most likely candidate I could think of out of a very small pool of possibilities.

I couldn’t talk to Cherok myself, of course. For one thing, I didn’t think he’d listen to a child. For another, if he knew he was doing my father a favor, I was sure he’d decline. But then, I didn’t need to. It was still early enough in the day that very few people were out and about. Mostly, the streets had Garrison or Collectors staff rushing around. I snuck into town and waited for an opportunity for one of them to pass near the school.

In my hand I held one of the keys I’d taken from the manor, the one that unlocked the kitchen’s door. I spent a bit of mana to enchant it into a scry beacon while I kept watch, and as soon as I noticed one of the Garrison members walking by, I tossed it out onto the street.

“Huh?” the guy said as it landed in front of him. He blinked down at the key, then looked up at me. “Hey, aren’t you-”

Mind magic was one of the most abused sub-disciplines. One part divination and one part enchantment, its primary purpose was to make other people do whatever the mage wanted. Nermet’s total subjugation was an extreme example of this, and I found it abhorrent to do something like that. It was a fate worse than death.

Perhaps that made me something of a hypocrite, because I had no compunctions against using a lesser version of that spell to keep myself safe. The version I was using was called command, and it used divination to connect to the subject’s mind in a manner similar to telepathy, then implanted an enchantment that directed them to perform a certain action.

The primary difference was that a command would last for minutes, maybe half an hour, before the target broke themselves out of it. This Garrison member was going to deliver a message for me and then go on with his life, while Nermet remained a literal slave, a mind trapped inside a body he could no longer control.

“Deliver this key to Cherok and inform him that Noctra has been murdered. Tell him they need his expertise in identifying and handling the specialty equipment discovered in the manor. The key will let him in through the food delivery door in the kitchen,” I ordered the Garrison man.

Nodding absently, he picked up the key and ferried it over to the school a block away. When he was done, the enchantment would unravel and he’d have no memory of ever performing the service I’d pressed on him. It would take a skilled mage to even detect that I’d ever cast any spell on him, and they’d have to examine the man in the next hour or two if they wanted to find even that much.

My mission accomplished, I retreated out of the village and back to my hiding spot to watch events unfold. If things went the way I was hoping, Cherok would discover the evidence and understand it well enough to speculate on what Noctra and Iskara had been up to. He would exonerate my family without ever realizing who it was he was helping, though I fully realized the evidence was only of the “it was justified to murder him” sort, not the “we didn’t do it” kind. It was a bit harder to work around that since I had in fact done it.

If things did not go well, I’d need to extract three people from that cell in the Garrison barracks by force. The easiest way would be to just use a transmutation spell to make a hole in the back wall so they could walk out, possibly with a handful of sleep spells to stop any pursuers. Mana would be tight, especially if I used too much of it scrying, and I didn’t have a good plan for our family to survive after fleeing.

It would be much more convenient for me if the villagers just accepted that they’d been duped and that they were better off without Noctra and Iskara around, especially since I was almost positive someone from that cabal would show up eventually to find out why the mana shipments had stopped. The more time I had to prepare for that, the better.

I gave Cherok twenty minutes to walk over to the manor before I scried on my new beacon, only to find it sitting on a table and the school teacher nowhere in sight. Had he left it behind? It wasn’t impossible to scry directly on the manor itself, but I’d been counting on the added efficiency of using a beacon to reduce the mana burden.

Just as I was about to switch targets, Cherok walked into sight. The man hadn’t even left the school yet! The village governor was dead and instead of rushing over, Cherok had taken the time to dress and groom himself and was even now eating breakfast. There wasn’t a shred of urgency to his actions either. A murder in the village was not enough of an abnormality to stir him out of his morning routine, apparently.

Unbelievable.

Half an hour and three check-ins later, Cherok was finally on the move. By that point, the sun was fully up and I could see people heading out to the fields to start their day. Cherok made his way east of the village at a leisurely stroll, stopping often to chat with anyone he happened to wander past, though he kept the details of what he was doing vague. At no point did I catch him ever saying anything more than that he had some business with Lord Noctra.

It was possible I missed it since I was limiting myself to checking in on him every five or ten minutes instead of watching him continuously, but it seemed to me that he knew not to spread information around until the authorities were ready to make an official announcement. Considering how long it had taken him to stir himself out of the school, I was somewhat surprised that he’d take that stance.

At least, I was until he arrived and I realized he’d still somehow beaten the Garrison there. How exactly the wheels of bureaucracy could turn so slowly in a village of less than two hundred people was a mystery to me, but I doubted this was the first time. Cherok had known he didn’t need to hurry, and even taking his time, he was still the first one on the scene. He’d already been inside the manor for five minutes before Karad showed up with six other people.

“Cherok, what are you doing here?” Karad asked after finding him in the room Noctra had devoted to altering mana cores.

“Helping with your investigation,” the teacher replied as he peered around. “Ganor stopped by and said you needed someone with some expertise to look over all the magical stuff in the manor.”

“Did he?” Karad asked, his eyebrows going up. “Huh… Not a bad idea. I didn’t think he was that smart.”

Cherok snorted, but didn’t reply. He just kept flipping through the book with all of Noctra’s notes on different possible lattice shapes. “This is fascinating,” he murmured. “If I’m reading this correctly, Lord Noctra was trying to figure out how to make it so he could generate even more mana than a normal mage’s core would.”

“Great. Does that have anything to do with why someone killed him? You wouldn’t believe what Sellis and Xilaya are trying to sell me on.”

All that effort to keep my family out of it, gone just like that. Now I needed to worry about Cherok’s grudge against my father causing problems. On the bright side, it did look like I’d managed to get someone who could read the books in the manor over there, so it wasn’t a total loss. This was a prime example of my earlier thoughts about having to control moving parts, though.

Cherok froze for an instant, then said, “Oh? I thought their whole family was gone. What do they have to do with this?”

“Who knows? Caught them and their girl skulking around in the dark a few hours ago. Can’t just be a coincidence that they show back up on the same night someone sneaks in here and murders Lord Noctra.”

“Just them and the girl? What about that dim-witted son of theirs?”

“No sign of him and none of them will talk about him. We found Nermet with them too, but you know he’s not going to be able to tell us anything. Just between you and me, I can’t figure any of this out. I wouldn’t have said Sellis had something like this in him, but they managed to survive for near a week outside the barrier, even if they did lose their boy. Who knows what else he’s capable of?”

Cherok remained silent as he flipped through the pages for a few more seconds, then asked, “Is there anything in particular I should be looking at? As interesting as this all is, it’s obviously a project Lord Noctra worked on for a long time and I don’t see how it relates to his murder.”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Karad said. “Wasn’t even my idea to bring you up here, though I’m sure I would have once I’d gotten a chance to see what was in these rooms.”

“I’m sure,” Cherok agreed pleasantly, though I caught him rolling his eyes behind Karad’s back. “Let’s just get a quick look around and see if there’s anything you need me to identify, and then I can get out of your way so you can do your thing.”

“Good idea. I haven’t had a chance to look around myself yet, though, so I’m not sure exactly where you’re needed. I think Tsurai knows better than I would right now. Let’s go see if we can find him first.”

I let the scry spell drop and frowned. Things hadn’t gone as close to plan as I wanted, but we weren’t out of the game yet. It would all depend on what Cherok made of the broken ward stone and the storage crystals. As long as someone came to the right conclusion about that, we had a shot at getting my family out of trouble.

If not… well, I’d be draining those storage crystals and probably breaking back into the Collectors’ draw stone room again. It wasn’t like the village had much use for the mana they’d already tithed anyway. If they cooperated, I’d probably use it to ignite a few other cores, maybe fix their ward stone for them.

Come to think of it, that was probably a good bargaining tool. I needed to talk with my parents, since Father would have to be the face of this. I did not want to be the target of whatever assassin the cabal sent to take control of their investment again. Nor did I want to be any sort of person of interest that they tried to kidnap and use for their own gain.

As much as it pained me to watch my supply of mana continue to dwindle, I needed to see what Karad was thinking about all of this so I could determine my next move. I recast the scry spell and resumed my spying on the manor.

“What’s all this?” Karad said as he and Cherok peered into Iskara’s in-suite workroom.

Perfect. Now I just needed to see if I’d given Cherok too much credit or if he’d actually be able to figure out what was going on.

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