Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 49

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Cherok peered at the storage crystals intently. “Yes, I recognize these,” he said. “These are crystallized mana, which means…”

Karad snorted impatiently. “I’m not one of your students. Don’t try to tease the answer out of me.”

“Which means these are the final form of a draw stone after it’s been completely filled with mana,” Cherok finished, shooting Karad a waspish glare.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and resisted the urge to groan. This plan had been a mistake.

“Sure, and why are there so many of them? Sellis claimed Lord Noctra was hoarding our own mana for his own personal use or selling it to Derro.”

“Preposterous. Lord Noctra wouldn’t do that. No, I’m sure he was using them for exactly what he’s always told us he was: powering the barrier. There should be a device somewhere on the grounds that they slot into to provide mana.”

“Fascinating,” Karad said flatly. “Why are there so many if the barrier hasn’t been working right for years?”

“How would I know? Maybe he was saving them for emergencies?”

“Possible, I suppose. What about the rest of these tools?”

“Yes, that. Hmm, well,” Cherok said as he peered at the workbench. He picked up the channeling lock and turned it around to study it. “I’m afraid I’m not actually a mage, so I couldn’t tell you what these all do. I believe this one is a housing for the crystallized draw stone after it’s been inserted into the barrier generator.”

I couldn’t tell if Cherok was incompetent and trying to bluff his way through this, if he actually believed what he was saying, or if he was malicious and deliberately lying to get Father in more trouble. Either way, things were not going the way I wanted them too.

Cherok hadn’t recognized that the experiment Noctra had been performing had ringed the village with dangerous predators. He didn’t know what the storage crystals were or how they worked. My only hope was that he wouldn’t be able to deny that the ward stone was busted. A couple of giant cracks running through them were obvious, but with my luck, Cherok would tell Karad that it wasn’t a ward stone, it was a thermal regulator for Noctra’s bath water.

Karad picked up the ledger and started flipping through it, his eyebrows going higher and higher with each page. “How sure are you about the purpose of these crystallized draw stones?” he finally asked.

“Reasonably certain. Why?”

“Because this appears to be a tally of how much mana Lord Noctra owes something called the ‘Wolf Pack,’ and according to the last entry, he’s only paid off about half of the total.”

“You’re not saying… You believe Sellis?”

“I don’t know what to think, Cherok,” Karad said, brandishing the ledger. “There were obviously things Noctra wasn’t telling us. Like, why was Iskara living in this suite instead of him? She’s his assistant. For that matter, where is she?”

Cherok flinched back and said, “I don’t know. Stop yelling at me.”

“Cut the posturing. I don’t need your wild guesses, I need facts. I’ve got a family in a cell right now telling me that Lord Noctra was actually an evil bastard who was scamming us, and I’m starting to think they’re right. I need to know what the repercussions are going to be to this. Is the barrier going to fail? Did it never work to begin with? Are these Wolf Pack people going to show up wanting to know where Noctra is? Will they take it personally when I tell them he’s dead?”

Karad was smarter than I’d given him credit for, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. I needed him to comprehend what was going on without getting any stupid ideas about manipulating the situation to set himself up as the new governor. But if he was smart and willing to work with me, well, that could be useful. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure things could work out well.

It would mean revealing myself to him, but it would allow Father to get away from the whole situation. He’d made it clear he didn’t want to be in charge. He didn’t even really want to be a mage, surprisingly. As far as he was concerned, his core ignition was going to make him a damn fine farmer, and not much else. What a waste.

As satisfying as it was to watch Cherok get chewed out, it wasn’t an efficient use of my limited mana. I’d learned what I needed to know. Karad had accepted that Noctra had been up to something. He might still think Father had killed the governor, but I didn’t think I’d have to work too hard to convince him that Noctra had needed killing.

I had a basis to start negotiations. The hardest part would be overcoming Karad’s initial prejudices. I needed to convince him that I was not a normal child and that, more importantly, I had the solutions to a lot of problems the village had. There was a severe mana shortage. I could fix that by igniting a few cores and teaching those people how to ignite more. They might not be the highest quality like mine, but they’d be ten times better than what they had now.

This little village could be an oasis in the desert if every single person had an ignited core. Things would be green again, and if they really wanted that barrier, an entire village of mages could easily afford it. They were already used to tithing their mana. If everyone gave five times as much as they did now, it would still only be half of what they’d be capable of making.

Alkerist could be an investment, my own personal safe haven. I just needed to get the first generation going, and they’d spread my teachings. A hundred apprentice mages with access to five or six utility spells and fire blast would be more than enough to repel a rogue agent, and if a mage of sufficient caliber to defeat them did show up, I could step in.

I wondered where Karad lived. I needed to have a chat with him, preferably alone.

***

The next six hours were a bore for me. I focused mostly on generating as much mana as I safely could while keeping an eye on my two scry beacons. My family was securely detained, but they weren’t mistreated. They were given a meal, privacy to use a chamber pot, and otherwise left alone.

At the manor, various Garrison members, Collectors, and Barrier Wardens cycled through, as well as two people I thought might be Arborists, but I wasn’t sure. I recognized them by face, but not name. Almost nobody stayed that long, and Karad’s orders to everyone were the same: maintain business as usual. They’d make an announcement when everyone gathered for the nightly Tithe, no need to cause any panic before then.

I had, sadly, missed the examination of the ward stone. Then again, if Cherok’s identification of everything else was indicative of his skill, it no doubt would have only served to annoy me even more to listen to whatever ignorant theory he sprouted off with there. Perhaps it was for the best that I hadn’t caught that particular moment.

The way I saw it, I had two options. I could force an early meeting with Karad, which probably wouldn’t be the one-on-one I wanted and would put me at a disadvantage, or I could let him make his announcement and work to spin it in my favor afterwards. That way, I’d have more time to generate mana and I could surprise him with the meeting on my terms.

The only good thing about my Cherok plan was that Karad had taken the key from him after dismissing him. Since Cherok had practically done more harm than good, I wasn’t sorry that the scry beacon was staying with someone interesting to me. Karad didn’t have absolute authority like Noctra had, but it seemed like in the absence of Noctra or Iskara, he was steadily taking over. No one had challenged him yet, but I’d overheard talk of a meeting between himself and the heads of the other organizations.

I’d considered crashing that as well, and I still might. If I did though, I wanted to have as much mana as I could at my disposal first. A day of spying had left my reserves dangerously low, and at minimum I needed enough for a mass sleep spell. It was slightly more mana efficient to drop four people with mass sleep than individually targeted sleep spells, though it did take significantly longer to cast. If the four leaders had assistants with them, though, I’d need something that hit many people at once to ensure I could escape if things went sour.

I waited until late afternoon when children were all over the place, free from the day’s schooling but not yet home for dinner. The adults were all busy working, and with no one paying much attention to one more kid running around, I ran across town to the Collectors’ building, then used phantasmal step to go right through the wall into the draw stone storage room.

The stones weren’t nearly as full as they’d been last time I was here, but it was still close to a week’s worth of tithing from the villagers. Draining them dry and adding the mana to my personal mana crystal was well worth the time and risk I’d taken. I used a second phantasmal step to get back out, blinked against the transition from dark room to sunlit street, and started off toward Noctra’s manor.

There were plenty of people there, but this wasn’t like the crime scenes I’d seen in my first life. The village didn’t have nearly enough Garrison members to cordon off the area, and I honestly didn’t think they had the training to realize they should even try. Most death in Alkerist was the result of accidents or predation, not murder. I imagined the few murders that had occurred had probably been much more straightforward.

It pained me to waste mana on a third phantasmal step, but I didn’t see a way to sneak through the house with it being occupied now, not unless I wanted to burn mana on a full invisibility spell. With my pitiful reserves, it wouldn’t last ten seconds. Since no one was guarding the outside of the manor, I circled wide around it to the east exterior wall and used an application of scrying to confirm my position against the room I wanted to enter and that it was empty.

Taking the mana from the storage crystals was painless and quick. The only hiccup was when I tried to use the channeling locks and found they did such a poor job at limiting transference loss that I could do it better without their help. Even that was a minor setback. I was happy to trade a few extra seconds per storage crystal in order to retain another fifteen percent of the mana they held.

Karad had set himself up in a parlor near the middle of the house, and if my spying was accurate, he would be met by Solidaire, the head of the Barrier Wardens, Melmir, who oversaw the Collectors, and Shel, who directed the Arborists. I did not miss the fact that none of them thought it was important to invite any of the foremen who kept the field workers organized. Really, that said all that I needed to know about where the power was centered in the village.

The other three were supposed to meet Karad at the manor, and I’d decided that I was going to crash that meeting after I spied on it. With the amount of mana I’d just taken from the village, I was more than confident in my ability to handle four adults. Even if everyone brought a second-in-command, eight was within my limit. The size of the parlor itself limited them, so unless they moved their meeting over to that dusty town hall section of the manor, I felt safe confronting them.

I just needed people to clear out of the manor, hopefully without anyone stumbling over me first. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if I was discovered, but it wasn’t how I wanted things to play out. They’d already long since finished their examination of Noctra’s suite, really Iskara’s. And if anyone did come in, I’d hear them in the main room and have plenty of time to hide or escape.

I settled back to wait for the appropriate time.

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