Book 3 Chapter 23: Revelations

++There are advantages to being born a freak, on occasion.++

- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E.

It took a week or so for the repair, and a great deal of crunch time to make up for the span of missed work, but we were just about able to produce enough oil that I managed my next debt repayment weeks later. Once that was done, I gathered up my subordinates and gave serious thought to what had allowed this disaster.

Sethira and Alira waited before me, alongside David Blakely and a group of hand-picked individuals from among Sethira’s cultists, the ones with the most combative abilities, and the mercenaries I had newly drafted into my service. This latter group all wore rings made and enchanted by Sethira herself, that would apparently kill them if they moved against her or left the vicinity.

They might have even done so, Sethira was not the sort to trust her fate to a bluff. Though it would have taken a considerable amount of time to enchant so many items with enough death magic to kill a man, let alone on a conditional trigger. The handful of warriors among the mercenaries would have required many times more power still.

“We need to change things around here,” I said to the group at large. “That attack occurred because we were lax with our security. We made a mistake in assuming that we would be permitted to simply see to our business unmolested. Clearly, we cannot continue labouring under that conception. From here on out, we will secure this site from attack even as we work at it.”

“Easy to say,” Sethira pointed out. “What are you actually going to do about it?”

Fair enough, I thought.

“We have an actual fighting force now, and I have already put out word on how we will expand it. That is a start. Our next step is proper fortifications and sentries.” I turned pointedly to Blakely. “I believe that is your field of expertise.”

His face spasmed, a turn of events that I could not possibly have foreseen.

“You want to make me a strategic target,” he said slowly. “And incentivise anyone who wants to attack this place to kill me first, basically. That’s what you’re saying. You want to put a target on my back.” I could tell he was fighting to keep his voice even, and perhaps avoid accusing me, outright, of purposefully planning his death.

“I want to make sure that the place both our personal fortunes are tied up in is properly defended,” I sighed. “I assume you do not want to deal with my father’s anger, should Qaigor or I die, so this is in your own best interest too.”

He spent a few minutes standing there and practically vibrating as his brain churned away, clearly trying to find a reason not to do this, before he gave up and just nodded.

“Alright. I have total control over the construction?”

“Outside of anything that interferes with the actual running of the refinery, yes. You will have all of the construction magicians at your disposal, and the mercenaries to work as guards.”

I turned to Captain Mariq as I said that, and was pleased to see him already withering under my gaze.

“You will be keeping us physically defended, both before and after these fortifications are raised.”

He swallowed and nodded. Unlike Blakely, of course, he knew that there was very little stopping me from killing him on the spot if he went against my will. I had always found that such honesty was the key to a long and productive working relationship.

“Alira, I want you to coordinate with these two and make sure that production continues without disruption.”

Alira looked to have gotten rather pale at talk of attacks and violence, but I was pleasantly surprised by her nodding with something close to ferocity. “I won’t let anything happen to this place again,” she assured me.

For all her strength, I could see the nerves fraying behind her eyes.

“You will hopefully not be required to fight,” I told her. Alira had acquitted herself well in the previous attack, and she was, like most Winzorth graduates of our time, actually trained in battle-magic, but she lacked the hard experience I was used to in career battlemages and it showed. I imagined that she could have beaten her last opponent in half the time had she been more accustomed to combat.

She would improve with practice, improve rapidly given how inexperienced she was, but if she died ahead of time…

“For that matter, I want you to move around with at least one warrior bodyguard wherever you go from now on,” I added. “In fact, I will be producing some protective enchantments for you too. A shield amulet for one thing.”

“That’s something we should do for the soldiers,” Sethira cut in. “The warriors are useful enough, but we only have a few of those, with maybe two dozen mundane fighters. They won’t be terribly helpful in any kind of attack without some…advantage.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She was right of course. Enchantments were helpful enough for normal magicians, but with ordinary people they could be a force-multiplier. A normal gunman with a shield amulet may kill five, or even ten times his number of unprotected enemies simply through his ability to weather return fire. That was to say nothing of the more complex, multi-faceted enchantments I might make over a longer period.

“You’d give enchanted items to the common men?” Captain Mariq cut in tentatively. I saw a lot of emotions in his eyes, chief among them disbelief.

“Yes,” I waved a hand. “Out of self-interest of course.”

“I more mean…Well, it’s more striking that you can do that. Or do you intend to labour at it for a year?”

Ah, right. “I can enchant faster than you probably assume. As can my subordinate Sethira.” Sethira’s eye twitched at being called that, but she kept her smile up.

“We’ll have to put aside a day or so to get at it,” she suggested.

And so we did, while seeing to a few other problems of course.

Captain Mariq consulted us on what his men could do and how they fought, which was helpful in guiding our hands towards the precise sorts of enchantment most needed. Unsurprisingly, shield enchantments were the first thing we came up with.

This proved trickier than it had been to make my own, however.

When wearing my shield amulet as a magician, let alone the most gifted one to ever live, it was a simple matter for me to make on-the-fly, almost subconscious adjustments to it as needed. Constantly altering the shape and volume to keep from interfering with my own movements.

A normal man could not do that. If I made his shield too thick, then it would snag on things unexpectedly. Too thin and it would of course fail to stop a bullet. A mediocre middle-ground was certainly possible, but I had never been able to stand making an inferior product.

No, instead I coined a new solution. Using my expertise in illusion magic acquired from the Winzorth Institute, I toyed around with an enchantment that would constantly emit a hum of mana that brushed against the nervous system and thoughts of its wearer, adjusting its shape and thickness in accordance with their own movements. It took a while to prime the mana properly, and required me to keep my mana connected to men while they ran through obstacle courses and performed exercises, but once done I had a rudimentary mechanism for letting people without even a scrap of magical talent work my enchantments. To some extent, at least.

Captain Mariq did not seem to quite appreciate this, but Sethira saw the stroke of genius for what it was.

“That’s fascinating,” she noted. “Not how I’d do it though.”

Now it was my turn to be surprised. “You can perform this too?”

She grinned. “Let me show you.”

Sethira’s own enchantments took quite a lot longer for her to make than mine did, though that was due to the difference in our levels of raw power and my being able to actually see the substance of mana, unlike her. Despite these disadvantages, I found that she could quite trivially do just what I had regarding the mental control.

Her technique was simultaneously more simple and more complex. She bound the enchantment to its wearer’s actual soul, allowing it to adjust automatically with certain movements and in proximity to outside objects.

“That is fascinating,” I noted.

“It’s just how it’s done in Orapathaqi,” Sethira grinned smugly. “To be quite frank, the Garamon way of magic always struck me as clumsy and odd. You’re all too fixated on the physical, and tend to ignore the spiritual.”

I could not actually contradict her in this case, the difference in complexity between our enchantments, despite them achieving the very same result, was night and day.

“Our approaches are good at different things,” I noted. “I doubt you could build something like my sledges, let alone my flying spell.”

She was forced to concede that. “I’m learning the Garamon style for that very reason. One can never have too much knowledge. Or enough knowledge, for that matter.”

“Speaking of which…I would like to study your magical style, too,” I told her.

Instantly the conversation changed, guards raising and talk falling into the old patterns of subterfuge and withheld advantages.

“Of course you would,” Sethira nodded. “But what can you offer me in exchange?”

I thought very carefully before what I said next. Once given, this next secret could never be taken back away.

But it was worth it. I had seen what Sethira was able to do with her knowledge of the Depths, that ancient necromancy was precisely why I had headed to her country in the first place. Now what might Lord Dread do with such power?

“I have another ability, a natural talent, that I have not told you about. One that is not recorded in the histories and myths about me, though one that I imagine the Gods know about. I can see magic.”

Sethira held my gaze, and did not seem to grasp the significance of what I had said.

“See how?” she asked.

“Physically see. As colours that you do not have names for. I can differentiate mana type, intensity, the way it is moving and being manipulated, how it—”

“That’s how you got such a complete understanding of my ritual!” she cut in. “Of course!”

Sethira drew more conclusions rapidly at that, and I saw her awe deepening. “...See magic. You could learn essentially anything, then?”

“Essentially.”

I saw her biting a lip in thought. “Two things,” my fellow lich said after a while. “Firstly, I’ll teach you my people’s necromancy provided you use your eyes to expand my own knowledge of it too. Give me your word on that.”

“I give my word,” I said instantly, seeing no reason not to strengthen someone who would be an ally for at least the foreseeable future. “The second thing?”

Sethira paused for a moment. “I would really like you to consider having sex with me.”

I ignored that, and the two of us focused our attention on advancing the field of necromancy.