Book 3, Chapter 64 (Patreon)

Averin was faster than I’d given him credit for. Barely eight hours had passed before one of his messengers arrived at the safehouse to let me know that the connecting platform was in place and ready for use. We both stepped onto the one at our location, I activated it, and a moment later, we were on what I presumed was floor ninety-nine.

The leader of the Breakers of Chains was there, along with four other masked individuals. “Hah, it worked!” Averin crowed. “You must tell me how you managed to pierce the tower’s wards.”

“The same way all the other teleportation platforms scattered around outside do it,” I said. “Why do you think I was studying them in the first place?”

“Yes, yes, but the technical details. I’d like to replicate these platforms for our own use.”

“That’s something we can discuss later,” I told Averin. His organization hadn’t been all that helpful to me so far, and I wasn’t inclined to keep doing them favors on the off-chance that I’d find a better use for them later. I’d thought they’d be a font of information that would save me a considerable amount of work gathering it on my own, but the Breakers had been a woeful disappointment in that regard.

“Of course,” Averin agreed easily. “Let me show you the warded section of the outer wall with the floor’s control room first.”

That hadn’t been exactly what I meant, but I’d take the change in discussion. While we walked, two Breakers in front, two behind, and one roaming ahead looking to spot problems early, I asked, “How are you doing with getting ahold of the books I want?”

“We’ve got a full collection of the standard history books used in our own schools for you to peruse at your leisure, but I suspect that what you’re looking for won’t be found in there. I’ve also managed to get my hands on a few volumes from the collections of various upper nobility. I haven’t read them myself, but I suspect that if what you want is contained therein, it’ll be obliquely mentioned at best.”

“That’s usually the way of it,” I agreed. Since I had my own suspicions, things that didn’t appear to be common knowledge, I hoped that my unique perspective would clue me into some details that others had missed. “Where are the books now?”

“I’ve got them stored away in a trunk in my own residence,” he said. “I’ll have them sent to you after this job is done. Now that we have an easy way to jump between floors one and ninety-nine, there’s no need to finish gathering everything to send down at once.”

That seemed like a reasonable excuse for why he’d withheld the books so far. It was hard enough sneaking people down the floors, let alone luggage. Sentinels would want to inspect that, and the Breakers’ fake passes might not hold up to that kind of scrutiny. I wasn’t sure what exactly the regulations were, but given how tightly the government controlled everything else about the Sanctum, I didn’t expect this to be any different.

We ended up pausing for a few minutes when the scout of our little group came back with a warning about a passing sentinel patrol. Averin cast some sort of camouflaging spell that both hid us visually and created a bubble in the mana flowing around us. We could no longer feel any mana outside that radius, but in return, no one would be able to feel us.

It seemed like a bad solution to me. Anyone with a finely tuned sense of the mana around them would notice the obstruction in the natural mana flows, but either there was more to the spell than I realized, or the sentinels didn’t have the ability to recognize what they were seeing. Or maybe they did notice us and didn’t care, but that seemed unlikely.

Either way, after just a few minutes of standing there and waiting, we were in the clear to keep moving undetected. From there, it took half an hour to reach the outer wall, where Averin directed me to the location of the control room. As soon as I saw what he was pointing to, I realized what the problem was.

“This isn’t the access point,” I told him. “Someone got clever and shifted it. Yes, the entrance opens here, but the actual wards keeping it closed are thirty feet to the left.”

This was the third time I’d seen this trick, and I’d only been here a week. Whoever had designed this setup really liked using it all over, and the fact that Averin, who’d been living in the tower his whole life, still hadn’t picked up on that was causing me to rethink my opinion of his skills.

He blinked in surprise and peered down the wall. “I… see,” was all he said as he followed the threads of mana making up the wards until he reached the right spot. He peered intently at the wards, and I heard him mutter under his breath, “Well that’s damned embarrassing.”

A minute later, a section of the wall split open to let us in. Averin walked back over, shaking his head, and said, “I’d appreciate it if you stuck around for a few minutes, just in case there’s anything else funny going on with this one.”

“I can do that,” I said. “Is it possible to send one of your men for those books while we’re here?”

Averin considered that for a second before shaking his head. “They’d never make it back in time. Getting through floor checkpoints with some of those books is a delicate process.”

“I’m going to assume that you live beyond the hundredth floor then, since you’ve been opening your own backdoors from here to the fiftieth for the Breakers to use.”

“One-oh-two,” he confirmed. “Just rich enough to get past the threshold, not so rich that anybody up there cares what I think about anything.”

That did tell me that the Breakers with us were at least respectable enough that they could pretend to have legitimate business on the upper floors. It wasn’t that I cared about their identities, but knowing this gave me a bit of information to help gauge their organization’s strength as a whole. This was a good endorsement, but the real test would be how useful the books they’d managed to acquire were.

There were no further surprises to be found in the control room, so I left Averin to his work and manually teleported myself back down to the floor-one safehouse.

  *

With my mana fully restored the next day, I resumed my exploration of the tower’s sublevels. The layout still didn’t match any rune structure I was aware of, but I was starting to notice a pattern. It was like the tunnels wound their way through empty space between where the runes would go, almost like an outline of a rune structure. I wondered if there were more corridors completely disconnected from the ones I was currently exploring, but unfortunately, the amount of mana it would take to bore through the stone to check was prohibitively expensive with the wards fully powered, and bringing them down was utterly impossible.

I worked my way down through another four floors, destroying countless mana wraiths in the process, before I finally found something interesting. At this point, I couldn’t begin to guess how far underground I was, not with the drop shafts between floors getting to be upwards of a mile long each and the floors themselves having descending or ascending hallways complete with several stairwells.

But this new one I stepped onto had something no other floor had. Or rather, it lacked something. The ambient mana was thin here, so thin that there wasn’t a mana wraith in sight. I doubted they could even exist without starving on this floor. The wraiths needed a mana-rich environment just to survive.

I started exploring magically, scrying eyes flying out in every direction while I stayed immobile and processed so many different view points at once. Other oddities immediately jumped out at me. First and foremost, there were a lot of doors here, always warded, and rarely in ways I could easily bypass. That stymied my efforts to explore in every direction at once and forced me to follow after my scrying spells to unbar the way for them.

Inside, I found very familiar trappings. There were research labs, archives, storage vaults, living quarters, communication nodes, kitchens, and more. In short, it was everything a team of dedicated on-site mages would need to do something like shape an incomprehensibly large magical tower out of raw magic, and spaced large enough for hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of mages to live there at the same time.

It was also extremely empty of any form of life. Whatever legion of mages had once filled these halls, they were long gone now, probably for thousands of years. The novelty of seeing where they’d lived and worked quickly wore off, and the annoyance of having to defeat so many leftover wards to fully explore the floor returned in full. At this point, I was only looking to explore every nook and cranny to make sure I didn’t miss the next drop shaft.

Part of me wondered if there would even be another sublevel below this one. Surely by this point, I’d descended farther underground than the tower rose up to the sky. How much deeper could it go before the foundation turned to roots that might or might not curl around the world core itself?

I didn’t find an exit leading down, but I did find something else. At first, I mistook it for a door like any of the dozens I’d already broken through, one that would temporarily halt my scrying spell’s progress until I could arrive to break through the wards. Even as I walked in that direction, though, I could tell there was something off about it. My scrying spells weren’t nearly as good as my own eyes at perceiving magic, but they were a far cry from the cheap spells I’d used to track my father’s kidnappers through the desert all those years ago.

By the time I physically approached the door, I was sure of it: the wards were different here. If regular wards were gossamer strands of spider silk, these were thick steel cables anchored deep into granite walls. Not only were the threads of the wards ridiculously heavy from a magical perspective, there were more than five times as many as usual.

“All of this just for one door,” I murmured. “What did you hide behind it, Ammun?”

I worked on that door for an hour, using every trick and tactic I knew. I created wedges to hold those bloated cables of mana aside so that I could access deeper parts of the ward. I made buffers to insulate myself from dangerous components. I cut powering runes off from the main segment multiple times, hoping it would run out of backups and starve itself while I laboriously prevented it from automatically reaching out and renewing its connection to the tower itself.

By the time I was done, I’d wasted more mana on that door than it took to clear an entire floor of mana wraiths, and it still wouldn’t open. In fact, the moment I gave up and withdrew from my attempt to force the ward, the entire thing snapped back into place as if it had never been touched. It was without a doubt the most formidable ward I had ever seen in either of my lives.

Maybe if I’d possessed a stage nine core and my workshop full of tools, I might have been able to break through it. As it stood, I wasn’t getting through this door tonight. I might not be able to get through it ever, not unless I figured out what the keys were. There were four of them, I could tell that much. That probably wasn’t a coincidence, considering that four Great Houses ruled the tower.

It might be time to loop Averin in on this door and see if he could help acquire those keys. Otherwise, my exploration was at an end. I’d found no new drop shaft leading deeper into the tower, either because there wasn’t one or because it was located behind this door.

Defeated, I left a teleportation platform nearby. Since there was so little ambient energy—possibly because this entire floor was being used to power the wards on this one specific door—I had to manually activate it. It took me back to my room on floor one and I collapsed onto my bed, exhausted.