Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter 73

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There were four people guarding the cell, but Karad was not among them. That was understandable, in light of everything that had happened yesterday. Other than the one scorched field, the village had escaped the conflict undamaged. As far as people went, the Garrison would be shorthanded and the Barrier Wardens would likely be divvying up a few extra shifts over the next few weeks.

Karad himself had taken on a bunch of extra responsibilities in his bid to take Noctra’s position. Even with me picking up the slack on all magic-related duties, that still left the actual running of the village in addition to his normal duties as the leader of the Garrison itself. I was no bureaucromancer, but I understood that it was quite time-consuming to keep the wheels of civilization well-greased. Apparently, even in a village as small as this one, that theory applied.

One of the cardinal rules of interrogation was to question prisoners separately. It was more time-consuming, but also much easier to sniff out possible lies that way. Unfortunately for me, the village only had the one cell. It wasn’t so much an insurmountable problem as it was a petty annoyance. I was significantly less frugal with my mana now that I’d completed my mana lattice.

“What are you doing here?” Trusai asked.

“Questioning the prisoners,” I said.

The guards exchanged glances. “Is… is he allowed to do that?” one of them asked.

“He’s not even supposed to be here!” another one said.

“Look, if you want to go get Karad and drag him over here, go ahead. I can wait a bit, but the longer we delay, the longer it takes me to get around to doing the healing on your friends.”

“Why not just do that first?”

I shrugged. “More important to find out if there’s anyone else out there.”

“Don’t waste your time,” one of the prisoners announced. “We’re not going to tell you anything.”

“Stupid kid. Ridiculous that anyone is listening to you,” the other prisoner added.

“Now, you say that, but…” I mind spiked both of them. Cries of pain as they grabbed at their heads filled the inside of the building, but they quickly faded away. “I’m not above a little torture to get the information I need out of you, not if it saves the lives of my people.”

The Garrison members looked torn between placing themselves between me and the prisoners and standing off to one side. They were having a huddled debate in whispers that would soon boil down to sending someone to go fetch Karad, but hadn’t quite reached that point yet.

“Which one of you wants to go first?” I asked. I was standing about three feet from the cell, far enough back that they wouldn’t be able to reach me through the bars even if they pressed their bodies right up into them. It wouldn’t matter if they tried; my shield ward was more than strong enough to deflect any clumsy attempt at a grab, but it was better to not give them any false hope that might end up wasting some of my mana.

“Do your worst,” the first prisoner said.

I mentally divided them into blond hair and big nose, for obvious reasons. Blond was the chatty one, and Nose was the sullen one hunched up and glaring at me. Perhaps he was less resilient than his friend when it came to recovering from mental attacks. That was as good a reason as any to start with him.

“Very well,” I said as I cast a sleep spell on him. Blond’s eyes rolled up into his head and he dropped like a sack of potatoes.

“What’d you do!” Nose yelled, leaping at me. He rebounded off the bars, well short of grabbing hold.

“Nothing permanent, and nothing painful. Yet.”

There was fear in his eyes, fear that hadn’t been there a moment ago. I didn’t know what these two had been expecting to happen to them prior to my arrival, but I was starting to suspect they’d had dealings with mages before. Perhaps the Wolf Pack had a fearsome reputation back home.

My small stature had worked against me, but magic didn’t care about the age of the practitioner, only the mana. If I could trade on a ruthless reputation other mages had cultivated, I was more than happy to do so. I raised my left hand and pointed a finger straight up. At its tip, I conjured an illusion of a jagged shard of black crystal, a physical representation of a mind spike.

“I’m going to ask you questions now. Every time you don’t answer, I’ll shove one of these in your brain. If I think you’re lying to me, same thing. This won’t kill you, no matter how many I hit you with. You’ll just wish you were dead.”

That wasn’t strictly true. Mind spike wasn’t fatal, and one or two shots wouldn’t cause permanent damage, but a dozen or so over the span of half an hour was a different story. If it came down to that, I’d have to mercy kill Nose, but I’d wait until I’d woken Blond up and asked him my questions again first. Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that.

“First question. Are there any other groups out there getting ready to attack us?” I asked.

Nose’s eyes flicked down to where Blond was passed out on the floor next to him. He licked his lips and said, “N-no.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Just us,” he said.

“I see.” I cast mind spike and waited for him to stop writhing around. Once I had his attention, I said, “Sometimes I’m going to ask you questions I already know the answer to, just to keep you honest. What you should have said there was, ‘Yes, there’s another mage and Ebalnat has been communicating with him via messages carried back and forth by a hawk.’ I won’t hold it against you if you don’t understand all the intricacies of the magic, but I watched you receive a message with my magic, so I know you knew about it.”

Nose glared at me through hands clutching at his face. “You’re a devil child,” he said.

Behind me, the three Garrison members looked queasy. None made a move to stop me. The fourth had, presumably, left to fetch Karad. I suspected I had less than half an hour left before I had to stop questioning the two prisoners.

“Let’s try again. Any other groups out there in the wastelands besides yours and that other mage who was spying on us with the bird?”

This time Nose didn’t hesitate. “No.”

I nodded. It was possible he was lying, but my own scrying hadn’t turned anything up. “Tell me about who hired your group to come out this way. You’re from Derro, right?”

“Yes,” Nose said. “You killed the mage who hired us. Both mages, I guess.”

“What did you know about them?”

“The one with the bird didn’t like to talk. His partner gave all the orders. My team is part of the monster hunter’s guild in Derro. They contacted us using guild channels and hired us for protection during travel.”

More and more I wondered how Noctra had planned to actually have Father carted all the way to Derro with nothing but Nermet to ward off an attack. Was Nermet some sort of idiot savant with the blade and no one had told me? Or maybe he was only supposed to go so far before meeting someone else who’d take possession of Father.

“Are there any camps or waystations between here and Derro?” I asked.

“Yes,” Nose said, surprised at the question. “We made stops at Falling Wall and Blighter’s Hole on our way here.”

“And how far away are those?”

“Uh, Falling Wall’s about a day’s walk from Derro. Blighter’s Hole is another two days, then two days to this village.”

So it was a risk transporting Father out like that, but not as much as it seemed at first glance. “Tell me about them,” I said.

Nose described a satellite village near Derro that sounded much like my own, except it had walls around it and most of the food grown there was used to feed the citizens of Derro itself. I could only speculate that the land was much more arable there, or that they had significantly more mana to devote to growing produce. The second stop on their journey was little more than a guarded trading post hunters used when they wanted a drink, somewhere to offload pelts and the like, and a safe place to sleep for the night. Its population fluctuated anywhere between five people and fifty.

Neither sounded like places I had any interest in visiting.

I grilled Nose for another twenty minutes, asking him anything I could think of regarding the mage cabal operating out of Derro, the two mages who’d traveled out here with the monster hunters who’d taken a stab at being human hunters and found themselves lacking, Derro itself, and everything Nose knew about magic.

It wasn’t that Nose was eager to talk, but after he earned himself a third mind spike when he tried to clam up about his friends, he didn’t give me any more trouble. Once I was satisfied, I put him to sleep and prepared to wake up Blond.

“Why were you asking him so many questions about that other place’s magic?” one of the Garrison guards asked.

“Trying to get a feel for how advanced their mages are. This guy didn’t describe anything too sophisticated, which doesn’t mean much. He could be oblivious, or the cabal based in this city might not operate in the public eye. I got the impression that they had power and influence, but not direct control of Derro.”

“Why does it matter though?” the guard pressed. “It only matters that they leave us alone. You already confirmed there was no one else coming.”

“No, I confirmed there was no one else here now, as far as he knows. He could be wrong about both of those points. I doubt this cabal will be willing to just give up after losing so many of their mages to me.”

The door burst open and Karad strode in. “What in the hell is going on in here?” he demanded.

“Interrogation,” I said. “I was just about to wake Blond over here up.”

“No one gave you permission to do this,” Karad told me. “And if they did, they didn’t have the authority.”

“I acted on my own authority,” I said. “It was granted to me when I turned a man’s heart into a lump of stone while it was still inside his chest.”

“You can’t just go around doing whatever you want!”

“Yes, I can. I’ve done my best to be polite and patient and helpful, but let me be perfectly clear. This village needs me. I do not need it. I am living here as a matter of convenience and I am investing my time and mana into it in return. I would be more than happy to relocate somewhere else if you can’t accept that.”

“Maybe you should,” Karad said.

I leaned back a bit and studied his face. “Well then, maybe I will.”

Or maybe I’d wipe that sneer off Karad’s face with a well-placed shock lance. I’d seethe about this conversation later, but for now, I needed to question the second prisoner to look for inconsistencies in their stories.

“I’m going to question the blond guy now. You can stay and ask questions if you want.”

“What kind of questions?”

“If there’s anyone else out there getting ready to attack us, or back in Derro where they came from. How strong the mages there are. That kind of stuff.”

Karad glowered at me, but gave me a sharp nod and stood there, arms crossed while he watched. I turned back to the prisoners, both of whom were caught in enchanted slumber, and reached out for the artificial mana core I’d placed in Blond to power the spell. Draining it gave me back a little under half what I’d used to make and implant it, but it was more than I would have had otherwise.

Blond groaned as his eyes opened, and I once again held up my illusion of a mind spike. “I’m going to ask you some questions,” I told him. “Let me tell you the rules about how you answer them.”

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