Published at 24th of February 2024 10:34 am

Chapter Book 2, Chapter 12

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The mage wasn’t what I was expecting. For one thing, he was at most seventeen years old. He had a thin, lanky frame and fine brown hair that was in disarray from the wind generated by his own spells. In one hand, he held a baton with a storage crystal capping it. It was relatively big, as far as storage crystals went, but it was already half empty. Either it hadn’t been full to begin with, or the mage was incredibly inefficient with his spells.

Mana built up into a force wave spell, flowing through the storage crystal into the mage’s core as he chanted a string of runes. There were far more runes than he needed, mostly ones to define the parameters of the force wave, to give it direction and shape. Those were things an accomplished mage could have imbued into the spell with willpower alone, but at this point, I’d stopped being surprised by the skill level I kept seeing from other mages in my new life.

Thanks almost entirely to the lengthy windup of the spell, I got close enough to reach out with a greater telekinesis spell and rip the baton out of the mage’s hand. He jerked in surprise, cutting off his recitation and losing control over the mana he’d been shaping into the spell. Unfortunately for him, mana had a tendency to go wild when spells broke mid-process. In his case, it meant that instead of casting forth a wave of force to strike Tanner, the wave exploded in every direction right in front of the mage’s outstretched hand.

He was flung from his feet to crash into a wall twenty feet away, along with just about every single speck of dirt and grime within five feet of where he’d been standing. The spell was strong enough that it scoured the streets down to the bare rock an inch below the layer of dirt. Tanner had been far enough away from the miscast that other than being pelted with sand and pebbles, he was fine.

I slowed down as I approached and looked the mage over. His eyes were closed and I could see blood dripping from a scalp wound on the back of his head, but he was still breathing. “Who is he?” I asked Tanner.

“Some enforcer. I don’t know, never seen him before.”

“Okay, why was he attacking you then?”

Tanner shrugged. “It happens sometimes. I have a lot of money on me; he thought he could take it. Just my bad luck that he saw me. His bad luck that you saw him.”

I snorted and shook my head. “You couldn’t even stay out of trouble for ten minutes. What do you want to do with him?”

“Do with him?” Tanner repeated. “You mean… you know… take care of him?”

“Yes,” I said. “I mean take care of him. Or we could just leave him. Is he going to chase after you when he wakes up?”

“I don’t think so. I think he was just walking by and spotted the shard.”

“Get used to that,” I said. “If you go through with this, you’re going to have to have mana to cast any spells. I wonder what these enforcers do when they find a kid with a full mana core.”

Tanner, who had been staring with pale fascination at the blood dripping from the enforcer’s head wound, jolted in place and gave me a wild-eyed look. I could practically see his thoughts crossing his face. He’d gotten lucky surviving this encounter, and not through anything he’d done either. How many times could he rely on luck? Could he get strong enough to defend himself in time? Should he give up now?

While he panicked over the future in a way I’d rarely seen from an eight-year-old, I took the opportunity to inspect the baton the enforcer mage had wielded. It was a simple thing, just a foot and a half long shaft of some sort of wood I didn’t recognize capped by a bit of metal shaped into a rough claw to hold a storage crystal the size of my fist. Compared to my own staff, it was worthless as anything more than kindling, but I extracted the storage crystal to give it to Tanner later. It wasn’t actually bound to the baton in any way. I suspected that the whole thing was just a symbol of authority for the enforcers, an easily recognizable weapon that let anyone they met know to do what they were told.

I’d been in Derro for several days now, and while most of that had been spent in seclusion, I’d also devoted a considerable amount of time to scrying. I hadn’t noticed a strong enforcer presence except for when I’d seen a group outside the Repository, which made me suspect they were either incredibly rare or, more likely, operated in the inner city. If so, I had to wonder what exactly this one was doing out here. Was it a coincidence, or was he seeking something in particular?

Or someone in particular. I’d gone out of my way to keep a low profile, but there’d been lapses. I’d used magic to disarm Nevin in front of twenty or so kids, any of whom could have spread that information. I’d also used magic to get around the city, though I’d done my best to make sure no one was nearby to witness that. I was confident I hadn’t been physically spotted, but some mage scrying the city could have seen it.

I might have drawn interest just because I was a small child selling rare alchemist’s materials in an open market. Or maybe someone had detected the wards I’d placed, though that was incredibly unlikely. Ward scanner was an advanced and expensive divination. I doubted anyone on this whole island besides me could even cast it, and even if they could, the mana costs made it prohibitive to use on a city-wide scale. A mage would spend more mana than I could generate in a year to scan all of Derro, and that was with perfect efficiency. Based on what I’d seen of the local talent, I wouldn’t bet on anything they did being anywhere near perfectly efficient.

“Hey,” I said. Tanner started and looked over at me. “Make a decision about what to do with this guy.”

If it were me, I’d kill him, split the ground open under the body, and close it back up. But then, I’d run out of warm fuzzy feelings a long, long time ago. Anyone who attacked me or mine did not get mercy. If I hadn’t stopped him, this mage would have killed Tanner.

“Do you think he’ll come after us when he wakes up?” Tanner asked.

“I have no idea. Even if he doesn’t, I’m sure someone will want to investigate what happened here.”

“Let’s just go before anyone shows up,” Tanner said.

I shrugged. It wasn’t a decision I agreed with, but I could understand not wanting a death on his conscience. Tanner was still young. If his life continued along its current trajectory, he’d outgrow that feeling. For now, though, I ushered him away. We were rounding the corner when I cast stone needle and drove a spike up through the man’s throat. There was barely a sound, and Tanner never suspected a thing.

The ground slowly opened beneath the body, letting it slide into the hole my magic had made. A moment later, rolling dirt filled it back in and smoothed itself out, one less problem to deal with in the future.

***

“What are you doing?” Tanner asked as I used stone shape to carve a ritual circle in the floor of the building I’d claimed for Tanner’s training.

“You can feel your own mana, right?” I asked. I certainly hoped he could. That was as basic as it got, and if I needed to help him there, this was going to take a lot more time than I was willing to invest in it. At Tanner’s nod, I continued, “Some people can feel mana outside of their own bodies, too. That’s how your enforcer friend found you. What this does is makes it so that nobody outside the circle can feel any mana inside it. Basically, as long as you practice in this room, you don’t need to worry about any mage noticing and coming to investigate.”

“Oh. That’s awesome,” Tanner said.

“So as soon as I’m done, we’re going to start with teaching you some basic mana manipulation. Then I’m going to leave you here to practice while I take care of my own business, and when I come back, we’ll discuss igniting your core.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means doing the thing that makes a person a mage. The longer we can hold off on it, the better you’ll be in the long run, but it takes months to fully prepare and I don’t think you want to wait that long. I am certainly not willing to, and it’s not necessary to teach you the minor telekinesis spell you want to learn, but it would make it easier for you to practice.”

Tanner’s jaw dropped. He sputtered incoherently for a few seconds, then took a breath and said, “You think I could become a mage?”

“Anyone can be a mage,” I said. “It’s not that hard. You just need to gather up enough mana and know what to do with it.”

“Whoa.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d had a conversation like this, and it wasn’t the first time I wondered what had happened here that the general population seemed to have forgotten even the basics of how magic worked. I’d grown up the impoverished and unwanted son of a drug-addled prostitute during my first life, and even I’d known this stuff by the time I was five. I’d become a mage almost by accident, but in my new home, it was commonly believed that the spirits of our ancestors would occasionally see fit to bless someone with the potential to do magic.

It was utterly ridiculous.

Derro didn’t seem to be much further ahead in terms of magical knowledge, but I wondered if it would be a different story in the inner city. If the rich and powerful were all sequestered there, it stood to reason that it was the most likely spot for such knowledge to thrive. The real limiting factor to doing magic in the wastes was the amount of available mana, and the mages here had come up with all sorts of clever schemes to fleece the population of as much as possible.

I finished up the circle and activated it with a single pulse of magic. With the amount of mana sealed in it, it would last for six hours, more than enough time to get started on the basics. “Okay, get out that shard and let’s talk about how to extract mana from it,” I said.

“You can do that?”

“Of course. What would be the point of the mages using it as a currency otherwise? They want the mana the shards are taking from whoever holds them. Although, now that I mention it, I still haven’t figured out what the rest of you get out of turning full shards into the Repository.”

Tanner shrugged. “Never had one to turn in until yesterday, and I’d spend it before I got anywhere near the Repository anyway.”

That was another mystery to look into, one among many. Somehow, whoever was in control of Derro had convinced the people living here to use leech stones as currency, and at least some people were turning them in once they were full. They had to be getting something back, but I wasn’t sure what. Maybe it functioned as some sort of tax or protection money. So help me, if someone told me that the mana went to power a barrier surrounding the city, I was going to start breaking things.

“So I just need to take the mana out of this?” Tanner asked, holding up the glowing chunk of leech stone he’d stolen. “How do I do that?”

***

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