Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter 65

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Shel and Karad sat on either side of me and watched my new scrying mirror as it followed after the black-barred hawk. For the last hour, it had flown in a rough circle around the arbor, stopping frequently to rest and scan the ground for prey.

“Are you really sure this is the best use of your time?” the Garrison commander asked. “This bird is… This is nothing.”

“This is the only lead I’ve got,” I said. “It’s this or just randomly look around the wastelands and hope to spot something. If there is a mage out there and they’re smart, they won’t be in the open anyway. It would take far more mana than we’ve got to effectively find them through magic alone.”

The hawk lifted off suddenly and all three of us leaned forward. Usually it took short flights of a few seconds here and there, but this time it was rising up into the air and not showing any signs of coming back down. I sat back, a satisfied grin on my face, and said, “Now let’s see where you go when you’re not here.”

The fact that the hawk wasn’t wheeling around through the sky, circling endlessly in search of food, gave me hope. It was on a mostly straight course west and north of the village and would arrive at the mountains in minutes. While it was possible it had a nest there and I’d find nothing of interest or importance at the end of its journey, I didn’t think that was going to be the case.

Sure enough, the hawk entered a cave halfway up the side of the mountain and I willed my scrying sensor to follow it. Inside, a sort of rough home had been set up, with a bedroll for sleeping on, a rug, and a small workbench. The owner of those supplies was sitting near a campfire that clearly burned only through the power of magic since it lacked any wood.

He was a man, probably fifty or so years old by the looks of him, but possibly much older if he was using magic to prolong his life. For all the wrinkles on his face and his gnarled hands, he certainly moved like a man half his age. He lifted an arm for the hawk to settle on, completely ungloved, and it landed gracefully enough that the man didn’t even flinch as its talons circled around his arm.

“That’s either a very, very well-trained bird, or there’s magic involved,” I said. “I think we can safely assume we’ve found a mage who’s interested in the village. I suppose it could be a coincidence and this person has nothing to do with the cabal, but that’s stretching things.”

“Can your spell let us hear him?” Shel asked as she leaned closer to study the man’s appearance.

“Not through the mirror, unfortunately. I’d need another day to modify it for that.”

“It’s real, then. There really are hostile mages watching the village. What do they want?” Karad asked.

“My guess would be the mana that’s going into the ward stone,” I said. “They obviously know about it. The real question is whether they’ll be reasonable and accept that Noctra’s dead, or if they’ll try to take over and resume his operation.”

“I got the impression that he wasn’t here voluntarily,” Karad said.

“Iskara was his keeper,” I agreed. “She was the one handling all the draw stones. To me, that says not only was he not here by choice, but he wasn’t even trusted by the cabal to hand over the mana he harvested. That doesn’t sound like an organization that’s interested in taking ‘no’ for an answer. What I really wonder about was if the governor before Noctra was also associated with them.”

“I don’t see how he could have been. The ward stone worked back then and there was no tithe. What mana was there to give them?” Karad asked.

That was a good point. It was far more likely that the Wolf Pack was aware of our little village and wanted Emeto to join their cabal, but he’d refused. They’d eventually learned about his death and sent one of their junior members who was in trouble with the cabal out to manage the place and turn it into a mana farm. I had no proof, of course, but everything made sense in my theory.

“So what now? Do we wait for this mage to come to us or go attack him first?” Shel said.

“We don’t do anything,” I told her. “I am going to continue to investigate before I make a move. It looks like this mage is here by himself, and he is most likely part of Noctra’s cabal, but we don’t know for sure. I can’t imagine there being another person living in this camp with him, but there could be other camps.”

“Why would they come separately?” Karad asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Only if they’re part of the same group. Whoever this mage is, he’s been observing us for over a week and hasn’t made a move. What is his goal? Is he going to just gather information and then leave? Is he even part of the Wolf Pack?”

“You think he might not be?” Karad asked, a look of confusion on his face.

“No, I’m sure he is. But there’s a possibility that I’m wrong, and I’d rather not attack an innocent man who’s just looking around. Taking someone’s life just because he’s acting suspicious without any proof isn’t the way I want to go about handling this situation.”

There’d been a time when I would have already killed the man, back when I was paranoid that everyone was out to get me. Considering the awful things I’d done, it was an entirely justified paranoia, but it had led me down an even darker road that resulted in a lot more death and destruction, most of which could have been avoided.

“I would say that I applaud your restraint if the situation were different,” Karad said, “but can we afford to continue to let this mage set up whatever plans he’s working on? We should at the very least capture and secure him while you investigate.”

“How do you plan to do that?” I asked. Even if the mage’s core was only at stage one, I’d need to stand guard over him constantly to keep his mana drained below a useable level. There were other ways to do it, but they were mildly torturous and included things like driving spikes made of draw stone into the man’s body.

Even incapacitating spells like sleep didn’t tend to work well on mages. Anyone who knew what they were doing would absorb the artificial enchantment core even if they were unconscious. The spell might even fail to take hold at all if they were aware it was coming and good enough to fight it off. It wasn’t impossible to make it work, but it would require a huge investment of mana to overcome a mage’s natural resistance.

That was just for a mage with a stage one core. At stage three, it would take the entirety of my mana crystal to put that mage down even for a few minutes, and I’d need to take him by surprise. Since my scrying mirror didn’t let me sense mana, I had no way to tell what kind of fight I’d be walking into right now. I needed to plan for the worst and hope I’d be pleasantly surprised.

“We could use the draw stones,” Karad said.

“No,” Shel told him. “Even I can resist those easily now. Anyone with a bit of practice can figure it out. I’ve actually been wondering how many people have been doing it all along with the nightly tithe. Ayaka has been telling me that the Collectors keep records and have suspected some people figured out how years ago and just kept it quiet.”

“What a mess.”

“It’s temporary,” I said absently as I leaned closer to the mirror. The mage in question had finished feeding his hawk scraps of meat and it had flapped over to a perch set up for it. Now he was writing something down in a journal, but I was wary about getting the scrying sensor closer to him so I could read it. I’d taken measures to keep it shrouded and undetected, but the closer I got, the more likely it was that he’d notice it anyway.

“How long is temporary?” Karad asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

I hadn’t seen evidence of wards, but if there were any, they’d be set up at the mouth of the cave. Sending my scrying spell deeper in would risk alerting the mage, no matter how well I’d hidden my magic. I just couldn’t quite make out what he was writing from my current angle. If he would turn just a little bit…

The bird must have made some noise, because the mage shifted, turning at the waist to look at it. I saw his mouth move, but I didn’t bother to try to read his lips, not with the page finally visible to me. I might only have moments to skim its contents.

Names. It was dozens of the villagers, most crossed out. Ayaka was on there, with an underline. So was my sister, though she had a question mark next to her name. Father and Mother were listed right next to her. She also got a question mark, but Father was underlined.

“He’s trying to figure out who can use magic,” I said. “That’s what the spying is for.”

Noctra had done the same thing, now that I thought about it. He’d singled Father out based on our Testing results as someone with unusual talent, kidnapped him, and had been in process of sending him to Derro, presumably to his associates there. I wasn’t sure what the cabal was going to use them for exactly, but Noctra had made it obvious he didn’t care about Father’s wishes, only that by delivering what he saw as a magic-capable person, he’d clear some of his own debt.

The mage turned again and blocked my view of the journal he was writing in. He flipped to the back, noted something else down, then tore out a strip of paper. With a practiced motion and likely a bit of mana to seal the paper, he tied it to the hawk’s leg. It immediately flew off, and I pulled the scrying sensor back to keep an eye on it.

“He’s in contact with somebody,” I said. “It would almost have to be someone close by if he’s using his familiar to pass notes. Derro is too far away for a hawk to fly there and back in one day, and it’s been hanging around the village every day.”

I ignored Karad and Shel as they debated what the mage we’d found was up to and what it meant for the village while I chased the familiar through the sky with my scrying sensor. About fifteen minutes later, it dove into some rocky crags southwest of town. There, with their camp hidden by walls of stone, were another six men.

Four of them were dressed in something similar enough that I took it as a uniform: baggy black canvas pants tucked into calf-high boots with a sleeveless green tunic belted at the waist. Each was armed with a one-handed ax on their belts and I spotted unstrung bows with quivers of arrows near their tents. Of the other two, one of them was wearing an outfit that had the same general color scheme, but with a lot more ornamentation on the belt, thick leather bracers, and a band of what looked like rune-etched copper wrapped around one bicep. I mentally pegged him as a commander to the other four.

The last one, the one the hawk had delivered the message to, was obviously a mage. It wasn’t the elaborately braided pale-blond hair or the half-dozen rings on his fingers that gave it away. It wasn’t even the expensive cloak dyed a dark purple or the pendant with an amethyst two inches wide on it. No, the real tell was the staff that floated upright next to him while he read the message. It was six feet in height and I counted no less than four mana crystals studding its surface in a band around the top.

“At least two mages working together and what looks like five hunters,” I said. “This is going to be trouble.”

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