Published at 24th of February 2024 10:34 am

Chapter Book 2, Chapter 8

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I waited on my rooftop hiding spot until the guards had finished sweeping the area. They were thorough and I had no doubt that if I hadn’t been able to fully shield my mana core, they would have found me. In the end, though, there were just too many potential hiding spots and they didn’t have enough time. I saw one of the guards talking to the farmer, who himself snapped back loud enough that I could almost make out what he was saying. Something shifted in the guard’s posture and the farmer’s expression flipped from outraged to afraid in an instant.

Eventually, the guards continued their patrol down Mock Street. The farmer went into the Repository to do his business, and I slowly siphoned more mana from my core into my shield ward to refill it. Most of the shield wards I’d seen since being reborn had been crafted as belts, but mine was an oval of alabaster so densely carved with runes that it didn’t even feel flat anymore. It hung from a leather strap around my neck, hidden beneath my shirt.

The loss of mana was less from the recent attempts to grab me than it was from the ward portion of the item reading the movements of everyone around me on a crowded street to scan for potential attacks. If I was going to stay in Derro for long, I’d need to prioritize feeding mana into the shield ward on a regular basis.

Once the guards were gone and the excitement had died down, I went back to studying the Repository. At first glance, the overlapping security measures seemed impossible to beat, at least not without spending far more mana than it was worth on spells that would simply overpower the defenses. While I wasn’t primarily interested in the mana locked away in the Repository itself, I also wasn’t planning on wasting a bunch of my own mana in my attempt to get in there.

As always, the answer to any security issue was the human element. The wards were exempting them somehow, and it didn’t take me long to figure it out. There were a few ways to prevent specific people from triggering wards. The most basic was to key them to the ward directly, which worked fantastic if the caster wanted to protect an area that nobody else would be allowed into. It wasn’t the best solution to a ward scheme for a business where employees would come and go and the owner might not want a former employee to continue to enjoy unrestricted access after their departure.

The simple solution to that was a ward key, which was what the Repository had opted for. People who needed to be able to pass through wards without triggering them would be given a physical object enchanted with a sort of code that allowed the bearer to freely move about. This introduced an obvious security vulnerability, but quite a few mages had devoted themselves to creating ever-increasingly complex ward keys to prevent duplication. There were even keys that had to be attuned to their users and would cease to function if anyone else took them.

Those were expensive, both to create and to maintain, and I doubted the Repository was using them. It was irrelevant to me, regardless, since I had no plans on stealing one. I just needed to duplicate the effect, something I could do manually and which I could hold in place through sheer willpower without any physical object to anchor it too.

That wouldn’t stop the guards from seeing me, but I had a dozen different options for getting past that issue. Figuring out how to bypass them was as easy as selecting the most cost-efficient spell to fit the situation. I’d have to come back when it got dark and see if they’d increased the number of guards.

I stayed on that roof for an hour studying the Repository. It wasn’t the best view, but it did afford me an unobtrusive spot where I could work in peace. No farmers accosted me; no guards gave me suspicious glares. By the time I left, I was almost certain I could work my way into the inner vaults without getting caught. I wouldn’t know for sure until I actually tried—there were probably additional defenses inside the building itself—but I had a plan and a rough idea of how much mana it would cost me to get inside the building unnoticed.

I felt a mana core coming in my direction on the street below, but a single glance confirmed it was just someone passing by, nothing to do with me. From the shifty glances the fellow gave behind him, it seemed like he was up to no good, but as long as he didn’t get the guard called on him and me dragged into his trouble, I wasn’t interested.

Annoyingly, he stopped right next to the building I was perched on top of. I could probably make it down the opposite side without attracting his notice, but I didn’t want to jump the ten-foot gap just in case anyone from the Repository looked this way.

The man started cursing and I heard the sound of a handful of rocks hitting the wall below me. Curious, I peeked over the edge of the roof and saw him pelting the wall with a bunch of dull leech stones. One after another, he pulled a handful from the pouch he was carrying, studied them for a moment, then hurled them against the wall with more muttered curses.

That pouch was a nice piece of leather, high quality and expensive looking. By contrast, the man holding it was dirty and ragged, his skin red from too much sun exposure and his limbs thin and gangly. It didn’t take much of a leap of logic to guess that the pouch hadn’t belonged to him originally, and that my unwelcome visitor was upset that it contained nothing but dull and worthless shards, halfshards, tenners, and whatever else they called leech stones around here.

Eventually, the pouch ran empty, and after another round of swearing while the man held it upside and shook it angrily, he eventually stomped off. My spy post was far enough off Mock Street that no one else came by to interrupt his performance, but I still waited a few minutes after he left before climbing down to examine the discarded pile of dull stones.

My understanding, based on my limited interactions with a group of half-feral children, was that dull stones were mostly worthless, collected only by the poor and desperate to take to the Repository so they could be reused, and not worth anyone else’s time. If that were the extent of it, there’d be no way for them to circulate, but I’d noticed people going into the building with full shards and coming back out with bags similar to the one the thief had held full of dulls. Presumably, they’d fill them with mana before returning them to the Repository to profit.

It was a bit of a lucky break for me, since it gave me a supply of leech stones to play around with. Judging from the size, the smallest ones would be easy to fill up without causing any real strain. My only concern was throwing them into my phantom space. I didn’t need the enchantment snapping if the stones ate too much of the mana maintaining it, but leech stones worked much slower than draw stones, and I wouldn’t need to worry about them growing until they completely filled themselves with mana. As long as I watched carefully, it probably wouldn’t be too much of an issue.

I scooped up a few handfuls of the small leech stones and fed them into my space one at a time to get a feel for how well my theory was going to play out. There was an immediate strain, slight but noticeable. When I fed some of the bigger ones, the tenners, in, the strain became a lot less slight. I added two halfshards and considered the rest of the pile. If I took it all back to my new hideout immediately and ejected them from my phantom space, it shouldn’t cause any permanent damage.

As long as I didn’t get dragged into any more drama, that wouldn’t be an issue. Working quickly, I cleaned up the rest of the leech stones, then rushed back east and north. Though I was new to Derro itself, I had somewhat familiarized myself with its layout. It took me longer than I wanted to make it home, especially since I accidentally overshot my destination and ended up in a market square on the main east thoroughfare, but once I managed to disentangle myself from the crowd, I quickly adjusted course.

One of the kids from before was in the market, and when he spotted me, he started following after me. He probably thought he was being sneaky, hiding in the crowd and around corners so that he only tailed me by a block, but it was too easy for me to spot him just by sensing the mana in his core. Nobody had all that much in Derro, but the kids had so little that it was possible to mix them up with the money other people had on them.

After we left the heavily-trafficked market behind, I had no trouble keeping track of him, and thus no trouble losing him. A few twists and turns, a burst of speed, and a bit of magic to hop the remains of a collapsed wall seven feet tall was all it took to leave my tail behind. I made it back to my own hideout, confirmed that there was still nobody within a few hundred feet of me, and entered.

The leech stones did more damage to my phantom space enchantment than I was happy with, but it had survived and an hour or two of mana poured into it would have it fully back in working order. My poor staff, stuck inside the space with the leech stones, was less lucky. They’d consumed a not-insignificant chunk of mana from the mana crystal I’d affixed to the staff. Individually, none of them had taken much, but there were more than fifty leech stones. Perhaps I’d been too greedy taking so many.

I piled the stones in a corner, now all dimly flickering in the shade. It was hard to tell if I held them up to the light, but in the darkness, the glow was obvious. The shards had taken the most mana from me, but the halfshards glowed brighter since they were smaller. Even with less mana, they were closer to being full. The tenners, probably because of their small size, glowed the weakest, and the pebbles that I hadn’t gotten a name for were the brightest.

“Where’d he go?” a voice said from outside the ruined house I’d commandeered.

I didn’t recognize it, but it sounded like a child’s and I was willing to guess it belonged to my new stalker. I was almost positive it was one of the street kids from earlier, but there had been a lot of them and I’d had other issues on my mind besides memorizing faces.

“How should I know? You were the one who was supposed to follow him,” another kid said.

“I was! He disappeared!”

“We all disappear when we’re running. I thought you were good at this. Aren’t you always bragging about how you never get caught?”

“There was nowhere for him to go. I followed him right into this alley. No way he jumped high enough to get over that wall.”

“Why not? Didn’t you see what he did with Nevin’s knife?”

There was a pause there, and the first kid said, “Oh yeah. Do you think he can jump that high then?”

“How should I know? Just keep looking for his tracks,” the second kid said.

I didn’t need them sniffing around my new hideout. Maybe it was time to lead them on a bit of chase to somewhere else, then find out what they wanted. I climbed back up onto the roof, made a mental note to cast stone shape and form some handholds so I didn’t need to burn mana each time I wanted to go in and out, and dropped back out onto the street.

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