Book 3, Chapter 55 (Patreon)

The sentinel manning the interface for the ward system probably wasn’t supposed to have a chair—none of the other facilities I’d been to did—but that hadn’t stopped her. I wondered where she hid it when important people came through who’d disapprove of a lowly platform operator having a measure of comfort.

On the other hand, she was asleep, and that was through no effort of my own. I’d placed an enchantment on her to make sure she stayed that way until after I was gone, but I honestly doubted it was necessary. This was something like my fourteenth platform, and at this point I knew exactly what I was looking for and how to get it. It barely took five minutes from the time I set foot into the building to the time I left. The guards at the front door never so much as shifted in place, and the pair roaming the interior wouldn’t come into the platform room.

The enhanced security really only changed one thing: the window to get in and out. It was tighter, but I still had three minutes to spare and I wasn’t worried about getting caught. With my collection of platform coordinates growing, I was confident that I could get in and out of the tower at my leisure now. More than that, I was starting to see a pattern in the placement of the platforms. The last three I’d collected had only confirmed positions that I’d already speculated would exist.

The only thing keeping me from making my move now was Senica. I was still getting her set up to work for herself unsupervised for a week or so, and more importantly, I was in the process of crafting a talisman imbued with teleportation magic. That wouldn’t have been a challenge on its own, but the need to teleport multiple times to get all the way back home made things a bit more difficult.

I’d devised a multi-layered tool for it, a fragile looking glass sphere that was in actuality solid as stone. It had a mana insertion point that was carefully shielded against being triggered by ambient stray mana, and when it was activated, it would perform three teleportations in rapid succession that ended at the platform back at Sanctuary. It would only work from this specific area, and only if the beacons I’d scattered along our journey continued to function.

That would be finished tonight, and then I’d go in tomorrow evening. The camp had everything she could possibly need, from a huge shielded storage crystal that was enchanted to slowly refill itself with ambient mana to a scrying mirror attuned to the one in our parents’ home to several weeks’ worth of food and water. She knew all the exercises I wanted her to work on over the next month or so and was capable of defending herself or fleeing from just about every sort of monster we’d come across since arriving in the area.

I was running through a mental checklist as I flew, still invisible, away from the latest of my break-ins, when I noticed movement in the mana. That instant’s warning was all I got before there was a man in the air in front of me, wreathed in enchantments to hide his presence. Even knowing he was there, the attention redirection ward he was shrouded in kept pushing me to look past him.

I slowed to a stop about fifty feet away and waited. The man seemed content to stare at me, perhaps waiting to see if I’d drop my own protections once the cost grew too great. The joke was on him though; what I was running didn’t create a deficit in my mana generation, not even with the flight spell holding me up.

While he was making his dramatic entrance, I took the opportunity to study the spells on him. There was the attention redirection ward, which was still working and was remarkably powerful. It took a focused effort just to defeat it, but I was able to push past the effect and examine what other defenses he had active. I had to admit, it was impressive. If it was all just for me, I was a bit flattered.

He had a mind shield to protect him from mental attacks, two overlapping and interlocking shield wards to deflect kinetic and elemental energy as well as phantasmal attacks, a reflection aura to send any attacks that did get through straight back at me, was both invisible and intangible, and had some sort of mist clinging to him that I couldn’t ascertain the purpose to at casual glance. If all of that wasn’t enough, He was holding a chronoslip talisman in the palm of one hand, the paper slip’s shielding insufficient to keep me from reading its rune structure to determine its purpose.

If it came down to a fight, he’d no doubt open with that talisman. If successful, it would cause me to basically lose about one to three seconds of time, depending on how powerful it was, during which he could act freely to set up attacks or flee. That was actually a bit worrisome since I had no real defense against a master-tier spell like that and would have to rely on my shield wards to protect me from whatever else he might do while I fought off the effect.

“You are Keiran?” the man finally asked.

“I am.”

I couldn’t get a read on the man’s mana core, not with so many layers of defense protecting him, his own shroud, and the background mana muddying everything, but I suspected he was at least a stage three mage. The mages from the Sanctum of Light were far, far more advanced than anyone back home.

“I represent the Breakers of Chains,” the man said. “We were informed of your existence over a month ago, and I’m told you were extended an invitation to communicate with us, one which you have yet to take advantage of.”

“I don’t need anything from the Breakers yet,” I said. “If and when I do, I would have reached out.”

If they’d learned about me over a month ago, that meant it was from those two Lightbearers I’d interrogated, which meant that there was a possibility someone in the Breakers was a traitor working with the Sanctum’s ruling government. Of course, it could have been loose discipline and drunk soldiers gossiping, but the overall impression I’d gotten of the Sanctum was that they were too competent to allow those kinds of informational leaks.

Of course, the people I’d gotten that impression from were low-ranking mages who’d gotten drafted into babysitting a food caravan and spreading religious propaganda to villagers who thought all magic was a divine miracle, so it wasn’t exactly an objective read on the situation. The dims I’d scanned a week ago were more of the same, raised on stories and promises with no first-hand experience.

“We were under the impression that you had plans to enter the Sanctum of Light,” the man said. “Is that not correct?”

“I’m not in the habit of discussing my future plans with strangers,” I said shortly.

“Of course, my mistake. Please allow me to try again. The Breakers leadership would very much like to speak to you. Would you be willing to enter the tower with me?”

“I would not,” I said with a laugh. “Are you serious? You spring up at me out of nowhere, practically drowning in wards, with a literal weapon in your hand, and want me to come with you to a dangerous place to a meeting with people I don’t know that have had weeks or longer to prepare it ahead of time? No, I wouldn’t entertain that idea even for a second.”

“I… see… Perhaps I was a bit… overprepared… for this meeting,” the man admitted. “But you have quite a fearsome reputation among the Breakers. From what we’ve been able to tell, you are capable of using advanced magic in at least divinations, conjurations, enchantments, and invocations, not to mention possessing a seemingly inexhaustible supply of mana and a mind strong enough to multicast three or four different spells at a time while channeling two more.”

“I’m not saying you weren’t justified in taking what I’m sure you feel have been adequate measures to defend yourself in the event that springing this meeting on me blows up in your face. I’m saying that as far as first impressions go, it doesn’t do much to make me trust you.”

“I understand,” the man said. “This does not change the fact that the leadership of the Breakers would like to meet you. Under different circumstances, would you be amenable to this idea?”

“Depends.” I thought for a second. “How do you feel about a scrying meeting?”

“The possibility of the spell being intercepted and spied upon is too high,” the man said immediately.

He wasn’t necessarily wrong, and since I didn’t know the capabilities of the mages living in the tower, I couldn’t say whether he was being too cautious or not. We’d need a different alternative then. “You can obviously get people outside the tower unnoticed. Are the people in charge willing to come to a neutral location out here?”

“I can suggest that,” the man said after a moment’s deliberation. “I do not promise they will agree.”

“Great. You do that. How soon until you’ll have an answer?”

“We could meet here tomorrow night, same time,” he said.

That would give him time to prepare this area as a battlefield, but it would also give me time to do the same. If we were going to work together, there had to be some degree of trust, and I did think their help would probably make a lot of things easier once I was ready to infiltrate the Sanctum.

“Deal,” I said. “Now, unless there’s anything else, I’ll be on my way.”

“Very well. Until tomorrow.” His voice turned slightly teasing. “Archmage… Keiran.”

He vanished with that, some sort of quick-cast short-range teleport. There was too much mana in the air for me to track him by his core, so I didn’t bother to try. Instead, I cast a few of my own wards to deflect any scrying attempts or physical eyes on me, turned myself invisible, flew a long, circuitous route, and generally did my best to make sure nobody attempting to follow me would succeed.

My best guess was that the Breakers had gotten impatient and had people watching the various towns on the assumption that I’d try to use one of the teleportation platforms eventually, or at least that I wasn’t done studying them. The group I’d met last week knew that I was interested in the platforms, even if they didn’t know why, so it wasn’t an unreasonable assumption to make.

I didn’t think they had actually managed to magically locate me. It was just brute force in numbers and some reasonable guesswork. All the same, I wasn’t about to take any chances with leading strange, possibly hostile mages back to Senica. In fact, depending on how things turned out here, I might be sending my sister home early.

That would be a shame. She was making fantastic progress in such a mana-rich environment, but it wasn’t the end of the world. After all, we could always return when I was done. Even better, once I gathered enough mana to advance my core to stage five, I’d be able to dive into the chasm where the mana was thickest and harvest it quite rapidly. It was probably too dense there for Senica to safely handle, but I had plenty of uses for heavy mana myself.

Yes, things were coming along quite nicely, and I wasn’t going to allow the Breakers of Chains to push me into making a move before I was ready. I’d make an effort not to burn my bridges with them just yet, but if their demands were too unreasonable, I’d walk away. They weren’t vital to any of my plans, and if they tried to coerce me into assisting them, well…

They weren’t the first cabal I’d crushed in recent years.