Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter Book 2, Chapter 6

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Draw stones stole mana out of the environment around it, not that there was any here to take. It also took it from people or animals who came into contact with it, and it did it quickly. If that were the end of it, draw stones would quickly fill up and become inert. Every draw stone would just be a rock full of mana waiting for somebody to come by and drain it.

Since that obviously wasn’t what happened, some mages started digging. Draw stones had some potentially useful applications on their own, so it wasn’t like the excavation was just to satisfy their own curiosity. Obtaining funding to excavate a magic eating stone wasn’t difficult, and it was quickly discovered that at the core of every draw stone vein was a similar substance that they dubbed leech stone.

Leech stone took mana at a much slower rate and condensed it down, burning through it to produce more draw stone. The whole process was somewhat similar to a tree spreading roots to seek the nutrients it needed to live. Leech stones needed mana, so they produced draw stones to collect it for them. With the new mana they took in, they produced more draw stones. Over and over, the cycle continued for centuries undisturbed until some truly massive draw stone veins grew in the ground.

There were a few other differences between the two stones. First, leech stone took far more mana to fill a piece of the equivalent size as a draw stone. Second, it did so at a much slower rate. A draw stone would suck a person dry in seconds, but a leech stone could take hours or even days since it was busy converting the mana into new draw stone and increasing its own mass. The final difference was that it produced a soft light as a waste byproduct of the process, which meant that a leech stone would glow brighter as it got closer to full.

“So how does this all work?” I asked, examining the leech stone one of the kids had volunteered. It was almost completely dark, with only the faintest flickering of mana in its depths.

“The halfshard itself isn’t completely worthless,” the boy told me. He’d introduced himself as Byon, “You can trade the empties in for a meal chit or something if you collect a few hundred, but no, you can’t buy anything with it.”

“So it’s only once it starts glowing that it has any value,” I said. “Really, that means the halfshard itself isn’t the money. It’s the mana that it’s holding.”

“Exactly!” Byon agreed. “But you know, it takes a lot of mana to fill one up.”

“I’ve had it for about two weeks now,” the boy whose halfshard I was holding said.

Unlike draw stones, leech stones could only steal mana through direct contact. That meant something else was taking mana from everyone else in the room, else they’d have a lot more of it. Or maybe they’d just burned through their reserves a bit ago when they raided the farmers’ carts coming into the city. It hadn’t seemed like they were going all that fast to me, but their baseline speed was probably awful considering what condition they were in. A minute of sloppy unstructured invocations just to move like a normal, well-fed kid could be all they had the mana to pull off.

“Alright, so you want money. That’s fair. Money’s a useful thing. You can buy food and clothes and whatever else you have to steal at no risk. I think I can make that work,” I said. “Where can I get some dull stones?”

“Why would you even want dulls?”

I shrugged. “Got to start somewhere, right?”

Byon grimaced and muttered, “You’re crazy.”

From his perspective, that was true. I tried to cut Byon some slack, knowing what this all looked like to him. Over the last year and some odd months, I’d started to get used to the idea of being constantly underestimated. For all the problems my youthful appearance gave me, it did come with some advantages as well.

Being underestimated here wasn’t necessarily helpful, however. I’d thought I’d made a big enough impression when I’d disarmed Nevin with telekinesis, but maybe there were enough mages living in this city that a minor act of magic wasn’t anything special. Or maybe a bunch of children living on the street were just too jaded to be impressed by anything. I could certainly remember what that felt like.

“I’ll make you a deal. You want money. I want answers. You answer my first question for free, and I’ll come back to you with any future questions, cash in hand. Though I’m not going to promise a tenner for every answer. I’m not sure exactly what that’s worth yet, and I suspect that most of my questions are going to be common knowledge, easily answerable on my own. I’m not going to bankrupt myself for a little convenience.”

Byon squinted at me, then glanced around. With Nevin still asleep and no one else willing to voice an opinion, he nodded and said, “Okay. I’ll answer one question for you, just because I feel bad about getting you involved back there on the street. After that, you either need to come back with money or join the crew if you want any more help.”

“Deal,” I said. I had no intention of joining a street gang, but if mana was money, I was rich. I just needed to get some leech stones to fill. Doing so directly would be far more efficient than letting a draw stone do the job anyway. “The first thing I want to know is where I can get a bunch of stones. Any size is fine.”

“They’re stored at the Repository on Mock Street,” Byon told me. “I can give you directions. You can trade a full shard for a bunch of dulls to be filled. Or you can find dulls laying around on the ground in alleyways and gutters if you look hard enough.”

“Probably worth a look to see if I can break in easily,” I said. This actually could be a good test of the kinds of defenses I could expect here. A storage vault full of empty leech stones would be valuable if only because they formed the cornerstone of the local economy, but wouldn’t be so valuable that they’d be heavily defended. I could sample what kind of wards were commonly used and get a feel for Derro’s level of talent.

Of course one location wouldn’t be sufficient to claim I fully understood everything about the city, but it was a good place to start that would be relatively low-risk. I’d probably wait a day or two, just to bank a bit more mana. With my mana crystal now part of my staff, and that safely stowed in my phantom space, it was a bit harder to get a clear picture of what my reserves looked like, but I knew they weren’t as full as they could be.

“You’re insane,” Byon told me. “We don’t need that kind of trouble coming down on our heads. Of all the people to try to steal from, mages are the worst. If they catch you, you’ll disappear. No one will ever know where you went or what happened.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “How dramatic. I suppose it’s a good thing I have no plans on getting caught.”

“Mages always catch you,” a little girl said from my left. She sniffled a bit and the kid next to her gave her an awkward pat on the back.

“Her parents were part of Blue Rat’s crew until he tried to pull a job and ran into a mage,” Byon explained. “She was too young to work for him, and with her parents gone, he cut her loose.”

“I think I’d like to know more about this Blue Rat and what kind of operation he’s running, but I’ll save that question for another time,” I said.

“Don’t come running back here when you get caught,” Byon said.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

I walked back into the sleeping area of the gang’s hideout, gingerly stepped into the nest below the hole in the wall, and climbed back out. None of the children made a move to follow me.

***

I found another abandoned house about six blocks away from where the street kids were squatting. Really, the whole city was far too big for the population that lived here and most of the houses were abandoned. That meant I had plenty of options, and I decided to choose one in a block that I couldn’t feel a single other person living on. It was possible the squatters in those houses were just out and about their business for the day, but I wasn’t interested in visually inspecting every single building for signs of life.

To get in, I used a weight reduction spell, then jumped up from behind the house to land on the roof. I slipped through the hole and touched down lightly on the inside, then let go of the spell. I swept the one I’d chosen for anything that might indicate someone might live there, but all I found was loose sand and some cobwebs. The floor itself was solid stone, just like the walls and the roof, what was left of it at least. Every building here was damaged in some way, possibly the result of an immense earthquake, but that didn’t seem right to me. Perhaps Derro had been near whatever cataclysm had struck this island.

Regardless of the source of the damage, my new home was missing a significant portion of its roof and the rubble had completely blocked off the only entrance. Unlike the street gang’s house, there were no convenient holes in the walls for me to pass through. It didn’t make for easy access, which was exactly why I’d chosen it. It seemed unlikely to me that anyone would come snooping around as long as I wasn’t seen entering or exiting.

I’d checked for any mana inside the building, but it wasn’t until I’d completed my visual inspection that I allowed myself to relax. I held a hand out and let my staff fall out of my phantom space to slip into my grasp, then got to work setting up my initial wards. The hardest part was that all of them needed to be properly hidden from anyone with the ability to sense mana, otherwise they were just drawing attention to me.

Fortunately, that was a skill issue, not a mana cost issue. I layered wards around my new home to prevent scrying, to prevent any other form of localized divinations like life sense from seeing inside, and to prevent any more dirt or sand from getting in through the ceilings. I also put down a ward designed to drive away all sorts of pests and insects.

I would have liked to make the place more comfortable, but transmuting stone to organic matter was both difficult and expensive. Some things just weren’t worth the mana cost. I settled for making a new sand bed like the one I’d left behind at my crucible. With my work finally complete and my wards flush with enough mana to last the next three days, I settled down to rest.

I’d been walking all through the night to get to Derro, and though I hadn’t gotten a chance to get any food myself, I figured I could fix that when I woke up. For now, mana would suffice to keep my belly from rumbling. When I woke up, I’d see about establishing some finances for myself.

But now, sleep. The rest of the world could wait a few more hours.

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