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Book 5, Chapter 28
🕑 Added 2024-11-18 14:04:31 +0000 UTCI’d been putting off a particular task for a few weeks now, one that I could justify delaying because I had other things to do that were arguably more important. However, now that three new archmages were here, I couldn’t delay it any longer.
It was time to go talk to Keeper again.
I teleported directly into her warehouse library in open defiance of her wards, something that I knew bothered her to no end. Every time I arrived, I noticed that the warding schema was more robust, better developed and with greater and greater amounts of mana powering it. Every time, I phased through it like it wasn’t there, anyway.
It was a bit of a game, her trying new and different ways to stop me. Maybe one day I’d tell her that what she was doing was never going to work against my teleportation spells. Her method of locking out a spatial shift was entirely dependent on creating a sort of metaphysical moat that prevented intruders from crossing a shell that encompassed the whole building.
My teleportation spells didn’t send me across space. The relative distance between the starting and stopping point had no bearing on how difficult the spell was to cast or how much mana it took outside of the absolute maximum reach. Instead, it forged a sort of path into the Astral Realm, one that sucked the caster in and then spit them back out again somewhere else an instant later.
Until Keeper figured out that she needed to flood the entire area with anti-teleportation wards, not just a shell wrapped around the outside, she was doomed to fail. But it was amusing watching her struggle, and she never once asked for so much as a hint to how I was getting in. And so, the game continued.
“Keiran,” she grumbled at me when I appeared next to the chaise she was resting on. A glow lamp on a nearby table cast light over her, and a pile of books sat on the floor near her hands. Another one was open, balanced on her leg so that she could read it. “You do always manage to interrupt me when I get to the good part.”
“It’s a gift,” I told her. “I honestly don’t even try. It just happens.”
Keeper looked to be in her late fifties, but only because I’d been trading her life-extending magic for the last few years. When I’d first met her, she looked twenty or thirty years older and was approaching the end of her life. Now, if nothing was done, I guessed she had a good half a century left in her. She’d learned enough magic from me that it was far more likely she’d live three times longer than that on her own, but her willingness to sort through the staggering amount of information available in the archive made her valuable, and she was quite happy to trade that value for more of my expertise.
“You’ve finished Galdrisa?” she asked. “Was there mysteel in there like I thought?”
“There was,” I confirmed.
“Perfect. The reference was a bit archaic, but I was sure that’s what the tome was referring to. In that case, I probably have another location or two for you to loot.”
“Later,” I said. “A new problem has come up. Tell me, have you ever heard of the Global Order of the Arcane?”
Keeper blanched, the color draining from her face. She froze in place, but for a slight tremor in her hands. “Why do you want to know about them?” she asked.
“They’re here. And they’re annoying me.”
Her mouth worked silently for a few seconds before she sputtered out, “They’re what?”
“Annoying. Trying to sneak around and spy on me. Lying to my face when confronted.”
“They’re… they’re archmages! Dozens of them. They’re all the best mages in the world.”
“Oh, good. You do know about them. Tell me everything.”
Whatever fear Keeper might have had of them, it didn’t extend to me. Perhaps I’d been too familiar with her over the years. Or, more likely, she just knew that she was too useful to get rid of, and that I wasn’t the type of person to casually execute someone because they’d committed some minor trespass. Those kinds of tyrants never lasted long, usually only to the first time they ran into someone stronger than them who felt the same way.
“Off the top of my head, they have a reputation for seeking out and cultivating great magical talents, though they’re not particularly active in this corner of the world. Their leadership is a council of five archmages, all of whom they rank as ‘First Order.’ There are six total orders in their hierarchy, but I’m not sure what you’d need to do to advance through the ranks. Even gaining entry to the Order requires far greater magical expertise than anyone I’ve ever met possesses, excluding you.”
“What about their goals and their methodologies?”
“I think that’s highly individual. They work on their own projects and support each other when needed. I’m sure the lower ranking members act directly on behalf of their superiors, but it’s not publicly available information. Most of what I’ve read about them is speculation from those who’ve come in contact with agents of the Order, though I do have one first-hand account of a member of the Sixth Order. It was a personal journal that was lost when he was killed eight hundred years ago and ended up in a box of books I acquired.”
That was almost certainly useless. I had a strong suspicion none of the current members had been alive to witness Ammun’s folly, which meant it was extremely unlikely anything that deceased archmage had recorded would mention the trio I was dealing with. Maybe it could give me a general feel for how the Order operated, assuming they hadn’t changed drastically in close to a thousand years, which was basically an impossibility.
Individuals might stay set in their ways, especially old pseudo-immortals. Organizations did not. New people meant new goals and new ideas how to get there. I’d been hoping Keeper would have something more modern on the Order, especially since she seemed to afraid of them now. That was a bit suspicious, actually.
“What do you know about their activities today?” I asked.
“Why would I know anything about what’s going on today?” she retorted. “I’m a historian, not a gossip.”
I squinted at her. “You know something. One of them was here, in Derro. Did they meet with you personally?”
“No,” she denied. “They just have a reputation for getting what they want, regardless of the consequences to anyone else – not unlike a certain someone I know.”
Scrying for a specific person could be difficult, but it wasn’t impossible. Scrying for that person back through time was a whole new layer of complication. Doing if it that person had warded themselves specifically against temporal divination wasn’t really worth the effort to even try. However, I was confident I could make some assumptions.
So, instead of searching for Bakir, who I already knew had been active on the island prior to introducing himself to me, and hoping to find his comings and goings around Derro, I limited myself to here, in Keeper’s home, and to a time span of about a month prior to Bakir showing up at the valley.
It didn’t take long to find a stretch of about three hours that was blocked from my magic. Someone with the time, mana, and desire to cast a temporal divination blocking spell had visited Keeper. It could have been someone from the royal family. They did specialize in time magic, though with more of a focus on divination rather than warding. Or it could have been a nosy archmage, looking for information about me and coming to the one person in Derro I still had any sort of regular contact with. If I were in his shoes, investigating an unknown mage with enough power to be a threat, I’d do the exact same.
“What did you tell him?” I asked. “I’m going to assume it was Bakir who showed up here wanting to know about me.”
“What was I supposed to do, Keiran? He could have killed me.”
“I could kill you,” I said mildly.
“You’re a lot more reasonable than he is.”
He’d seemed so mild-mannered to me, too. Though, perhaps I was making a mistake in assuming it was Bakir. If Nevlac had been her surprise guest, I could see him threatening her. “What did he look like?” I asked.
“Tall. Handsome. Brown hair with just enough gray to look distinguished.”
That was definitely Bakir. I supposed he was one of those people who was only polite to those who rivaled his social station. He must have been a devil to his servants. Or perhaps he was just playing the role in his pursuit of information. I’d certainly done that enough times in recent years to get what I wanted, though I generally found it more of a hassle than it was worth.
“He wanted to know what spells you knew, how many you could cast without stopping, how well you shielded your core, stuff like that,” Keeper said. “He seemed to be sizing you up.”
“You could have warned me,” I said. “Why didn’t you?”
“He’d know. He’s going to know about this!”
“No, he won’t. I’ve blocked out this meeting from temporal scrying and destroyed the four surveillance spells he left here. The most he’ll know is that someone was here. He’ll probably assume it was me.”
Keeper shook her head. “It won’t matter. He’ll know he missed something and then he’ll be back with more questions.”
“Yes, yes he will.” I grinned. “And when he does come, you’re going to let me know. I’d like to have a few words with them.”
Specifically, I wanted to catch one of them alone and away from their wards. I should have killed Bakir when he first showed up, but I’d been wary of upsetting an unknown cabal of archmages. Now that I knew they were all a bunch of pretenders to a title they didn’t understand, I was done handling them gently. It was time to get some answers.
“Here, take this. It’s a transmission stone. Keep it on you, and when the Order’s representative shows up, you message me immediately. I’ll come handle him.” I pulled a duplicate of one of the stones I’d made for New Alkerist from my phantom space and handed it over to Keeper. “Unless he’s in your mind reading your thoughts at the time you use it, it’s undetectable. You don’t even need to touch it, just keep it on you. Anywhere within three feet of your body is fine.”
Keeper accepted the stone somewhat hesitantly. “I thought you’d be… more upset.”
“Oh, I am livid,” I said. “Not at you. I don’t expect you to stand up to an archmage, even a fake one like the people from the Order. But I am tired of getting sidetracked from my work putting out new fires every other week. It’s become very obvious to me that the Order is not here to help. They’re looking to advance their own agenda and trying to find a way to use me to do so. I’m going to smack their noses once and they’d better learn their lesson.”
“And if they don’t?”
I considered Nevlac’s open hostility, and Adilar’s almost slimy false politeness. Bakir had behaved pleasantly enough to my face, but he was still a nuisance who’d been threatening allies I relied on to further my interests. So far, the Global Order of the Arcane had shown themselves to be nothing more than a hinderance to my plans, one with no interest in anything but themselves.
“You’ve read your history books. I’m sure I’ve made a few appearances in them. Back in my day, I was not known for my benevolent nature. I don’t imagine the historians got that part wrong, did they?”
“No,” Keeper said softly. “No, they did not.”
Comments
Kyle Hunter
Great line at the end! I could feel the fear in that "no."
E
Hell yeah fuck them up. It really is safest if he has a monopoly on advanced magic
lenkite
The Order actually seem the type of Mages who Ammun can lead along with the nose. I doubt they truly care if he broke the world.
Hunter Vook
Smack em on the nose real quick.
