Book 3, Chapter 56 (Patreon)

Senica looked at the glass orb I’d handed her. A little ring of brass floated inside, its surface covered in tiny runes. “What does it do?” she asked.

“It’s your emergency escape tool,” I said. “Three temporarily accelerated teleportation spells that will cast instantly if you inject mana into the orb, pulling you from wherever you’re currently standing back to Sanctuary. Keep it with you at all times. I mean that, Senica. Don’t bury it in the bottom of your backpack. I want you to be able to lay hands on it in less than three seconds.”

“Seems excessive,” she said suspiciously. “Why build a tool that takes me all the way back home instead of back to our base here? You’re about to do something dangerous, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “A terrorist faction trying to bring down the tower’s ruling class has reached out to me and requested a meeting. Their representative had a master-tier spell on a paper talisman prepared to use against me if things turned hostile when he approached me. This group has resources. I don’t want them even knowing that you exist, let alone where to find you.”

“So what am I supposed to do then? Just sit in this cave and wait for you to come back?”

“Try to get some more spell practice in while you’re waiting,” I recommended.

Senica threw the teleportation orb at my head.

“Hey now,” I said, catching it and tossing it back to her. “The alternative is to send you back home now. You’ve had a lot of freedom on this trip, way more than our parents would be happy about if they knew. But this is my journey, one that I started with very specific goals. This meeting is a step toward those goals, but I need to know that you’re going to be safe without me here watching you. Besides, what kind of brother would I be if I left you stranded?”

“If it’s so dangerous, maybe I should come with you,” she started.

“Not a chance.”

“I don’t mean at the meeting, but I could watch your back. I’m pretty good with this wand, you know. I bet I could help.”

“I will knock you unconscious before I go if you even think about trying to follow me,” I threatened. “Don’t test me on this. These people are more dangerous than the Wolf Pack by a huge amount. I wouldn’t be going to this meeting myself if I was still as weak as I was a few years ago.”

“You don’t even know if it’s happening. The guy hasn’t come back yet.”

“It’s definitely happening,” I said. “If they didn’t want my help so bad, they’d have waited for me to enter the tower in my own time and reach out to them. This group has some sort of problem they’re hoping I’ll help them solve.”

“Hmph. If you say so.”

“You want to go out flying today?” I asked. “Might be your last chance to stretch your legs for a few days.”

Senica glanced over at the pile of books she was working her way through, then at the mana resistor I’d made for her to work on training her willpower to hold channeled spells longer, then to the wall covered in runes she laboriously etched into stone every day, only for me to examine them and then use stone shape to flatten out again each night. Finally, she looked back at me. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  *

There were two men at the meeting this time. The first I recognized as the one I’d met last night who hadn’t given me his name. The other was new, and like the messenger, he was protected by layers of defensive spells. A sword strapped to his belt fairly blazed with mana in my mind, some sort of implement for wielding magic. Basically, it was a wand made of metal with a sharp edge. Both wore their hoods pulled low over their faces and used magic to deepen the shadows those hoods cast.

We were on the ground, this time, a few miles southwest of the town. I’d already swept the area for traps before I arrived, and I was sure the Breakers had done the same. That just left the possibility of whatever spells, talismans, wards, wands, or other trinkets we were carrying to contend with. For my part, I’d made my preparations for being attacked many years ago, and I’d only improved upon that as my resources increased.

“Hello, Keiran,” the messenger from last night said. “The Breakers have agreed to your meeting terms.”

“So it would appear,” I said. “I take it this is the man who’ll be meeting with me.”

“I am,” the other mage said.

“Do you have a name?” I asked.

He answered without hesitation. “Averin.”

I noticed the messenger started and his hood swung around to peer at his companion. That was interesting that he hadn’t known who he was escorting to the meeting. I wondered if Averin was somebody famous and important inside the tower.

“Should I assume you have the authority to negotiate on behalf of the Breakers?”

“You should,” Averin said. “In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the Breakers answer to me, so I have no need to negotiate on their behalf.”

Ah, the leader himself. Whatever they wanted, they were desperate to get it. They weren’t here to give me an answer about meeting outside the tower. This was the meeting. And the messenger was either in an extremely trusted position to be allowed to know who he’d escorted out here, or he wasn’t going to live through the night.

“Very well,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me what the Breakers of Chains want from me.”

Averin gestured back to the tower. “You’ve seen bits and pieces of the Sanctum of Light, I’m sure, enough to know what it looks like. But do you understand how it operates? Do you know who makes the laws and who enforces them? Do you know who profits and who suffers under those laws?”

“I’m sure I don’t care about any of that,” I said.

“And why would you? This isn’t your land. These aren’t your people. You are a traveler from far, far away, or so you’ve said. But we were born here. Some of us have lived in that tower for hundreds of years. Many of us die without ever setting foot outside it. We care.”

I hadn’t made any mention of my status as a world traveler to any of the group I’d collaborated with a week ago. I’d only said I was an independent mage. That meant Averin’s information came from what I’d revealed to the Lightbearers, which also meant they already knew about Senica. That might amount to nothing—I’d done a very good job of hiding our camp, after all—but it did mean there was some level of danger to her. I might have to send her back home until I was done with my business after all.

“I tell you this not to try to persuade you to take up our cause, but to explain it,” Averin went on, oblivious to my thoughts. “There are four Great Houses that control the Sanctum of Light jointly through a council of twenty members. Each House sends five members with various overlapping responsibilities, but all with the ultimate goal of enriching themselves at the expense of the other three Great Houses, the numerous lesser Houses, and the commoners who make up the lower hundred floors.

“These four Great Houses are our targets. True change can only come when they are removed from power, when their whole system is torn down so that we can start anew. That is what we strive for, to weaken and ultimately depose their council.”

Averin was getting quite impassioned with his speech, but I had no interest in what he was telling me, so I held up a hand to stop him. “Skip all of that. I don’t need to know how your government works. Just tell me what you want from me.”

I had a strong suspicion it was going to be help attacking the nobles inside their fortified homes. The last time I’d done that, I’d been facing mages who struggled with anything stronger than intermediate-tier spells, and before that, I’d been a true archmage with the full breadth of my power and resources to wield against my target. I expected this time would be a very different experience.

“There are a lot of restricted areas we can’t get into,” Averin said. “Places with sensitive information, caches of weapons, supplies, and so on. Nelgith reported that you went right through the wards around the teleportation platform, even managed to trick the platform itself into sending them to the tower without needing a confirmation check or setting off the alarms. We want your ward-breaking abilities to get us into places we haven’t been able to access.”

“That’s not all of it, is it?” I asked, suspicious. Such a vague goal for the off-chance to raid a few secret labs or locked storage depots wouldn’t have necessitated such an urgent response.

“No,” Averin admitted. His hood twitched slightly in the direction of the messenger mage, as if he were debating how much to say in front of the other man. “There’s rumors that the Great Houses have been working together to create some sort of super weapon, something they plan to point directly at us. At first, we didn’t give the idea much credence, but in the last year or so, more and more rumors are starting to point toward it being true. We need to find it and destroy it before they finish it.”

“You have an idea of where it is?”

“Maybe. That’s sort of the problem. There are too many possibilities. I’ve got people trying to narrow it down, but there are just too many doors we can’t get a look behind right now.”

It sounded like easy enough work for me. Ward breaking wasn’t a particular specialty of mine, but I’d yet to find a ward I couldn’t get through if I was given the time and space to properly study it. Of course, there’d been more than a few that had been guarded by other means specifically to keep people like me from studying them. I doubted this job would be as easy as Averin was making it seem.

“Alright, well, that’s what you want. What are you offering?” I asked.

“The assistance of an organization with thousands of people placed on just about every floor in the entire tower?” he asked as much as stated. “To be honest with you, we haven’t quite figured out why you’re here yet.”

“What if I was here to knock that tower down?”

Averin laughed. “I would wish you the best of luck and not place any bets on you succeeding.”

I didn’t join him in laughing. After a moment, he cut himself short and said, “That’s… not really why you’re here, is it?”

“No. I do want to investigate this tower, though. I want to know why it’s here, who built it, for what purpose, and where all the mana comes from.”

“Ah. Questions that have stumped scholars for ages,” Averin said. “I don’t know the answers, but I have a few good ideas about where you might go about looking for them. I can assure you it wasn’t divine providence, as the Houses would have the commoners believe.”

“I never thought it might be,” I told him.

“Perhaps you’d like to come with us and see the inside of the tower for yourself,” he said. “It might give you some of the answers you seek, or at least inspire a few new questions.”

“And how would we go about doing that?”

“The same way we always get people in and out when we don’t want to be noticed. We’ll smuggle ourselves in with the food shipments. One of our members is the inspector for an interior platform who knows to look the other way when he sees someone hiding amidst the cargo. It’s about a hundred miles north of here, but we should have a few hours before the next shipment is due to arrive on that platform.”

“That sounds terribly inefficient. Why not just teleport us in directly from here?” I asked.

Averin’s face was still shrouded in darkness, but I could almost see his eyebrows shoot up just from the way his hood shifted. “You can do that?”

I grinned. “Why do you think I was spending all that time and energy poking at the platforms out here?”