Book 4 Chapter 10: Homeland

++It doesn’t matter where they’re getting the bloody funds from, the point is they have them, and they’re more than enough to make up for the lapse in business. We’ll send five men to tend their grounds tomorrow or we’re losing the opportunity of a lifetime.++

- Memo from ‘Arthur’s Landscaping’, a groundskeeping company local to Lachfel. Apparently discussing the Vornholt Estate.

Qaigor had gotten used to his new eye since I gave it to him, adjusting fortunately quickly. Whether that was a feature of his warrior’s body, simple youth or some particular quality about him, I did not yet have the data to know. A sample size of two was unfortunately close to useless as far as drawing any hard conclusions went.

I did not need to understand the phenomena to recognise its immediate use, however. With his mood improved, his eye seamlessly integrated and his ability to go without mentioning the incident now practiced enough to leave me confident, he was finally ready to return to Garamon.

Ready, and eager. The boy was practically bouncing off his walls when I entered his quarters. A statement that rather intensifies in meaning when one is using it to describe a warrior of the Third Order. Qaigor had grown stronger and faster since the assault, perhaps almost the equal of our father in his prime, and certainly superior to him as of the attack on my refinery.

Obviously, he was superior now, having twice as many legs.

I had called ahead of me to let Qaigor know we would be departing, and his excitement was like a bonfire as I entered. “Are we leaving now!?” he asked me urgently. Everything is urgent for a twelve year-old boy.

“We are,” I assured him. “I have set up a new sled. We just need to gather up father.”

My father was not pleased. He had been forced to wait in Poloira and recover on account of his leg being lost, and it seemed that he was growing more humiliated by the day. A strange melancholy had overtaken him since before the assault, I thought, though the precise cause I did not care to guess at. The effect was clear enough. He had taken on the disposition of an abused dog, willing to meet my eye but little more than that.

Fortunately there had been servants to see to it that he was fed and bathed, something which only seemed to infuriate him all the more.

“We are going back to Garamon, father,” I told him. He looked up at me with hollow eyes.

“Okay,” he said.

I was pleasantly surprised to find him so pliant, having been half-concerned that he would make some sort of fuss about the unexpected journey. His apathy made it simple to have him carted out onto my sled and then drive him across Poloira, with Qaigor’s excitement being only somewhat muted by the presence of his beaten-down father.

For my part, I enjoyed the journey for a very different reason. I had recently turned nineteen, and could muster close to twenty nine thousand vis at my maximum output. I was firmly into the territory of a Second Class Highmage and was growing stronger all the time. A few short more years would leave me in First Class.

This newfound power was demonstrated perfectly well in my speed as I propelled us along Poloira. My father weighed about as much as Blakely, even with his missing leg, and yet I achieved a higher velocity on land than I had with Blakely and Qaigor by sea. It got to the point where my limiting factor became the speed at which clipping a single bump on the ground would produce a fatal amount of deceleration.

And even then, I reminded myself, my body was not so fragile anymore. I would not be testing it by jumping off any clock towers for a while, but I did not need to take for granted that I would die to events that killed others.

It was when we took to the air, though, that I got to enjoy the full scope of my new powers. So much raw magical energy that the sound of our flight was left far in my wake. Before it had taken me less than two hours to cross the ocean from Poloira to Garamon, now it was closer to ninety minutes. I did some mental calculations and became rather excited for the day when I would wield the power of an Archmage. One hundred thousand vis would send me between continents in less than a single hour.

Assuming I did not find some more efficient means of travel to quicken my transport even more.

Lachfel greeted me like an old friend.

Hm. I had sex now. Should I have started saying ‘old lover’ instead? Best to wait, I was not yet sure how old lovers greeted each other. For all I knew it was customary to open with a gunshot. In any case, Lachfel was familiar and, in its way, oddly comforting. So much of my life had been centred on the grand business of my refinery that there was now something shockingly quaint about the city of my birth.

Qaigor’s own reaction was a more unmasked affection for the place. I realised that his time in Poloira with me had probably been the greatest span the boy had ever spent away from home.

Then I saw him leaning over the side of the sled as we slowed to land, and instincts took over as I realised he was still several hundred yards above-ground.

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“Stop,” I snapped, grabbing his arm and pulling hard to drag him back. It did not work. Qaigor probably did not even notice the difference in my strength, and leaned into his seat only out of respect for me rather than any physical ability I had to force him.

“You’re still worried about me?” he grinned. “I’ve been in battle for you!”

“Yes, and you got your eye sliced out,” I pointed out, then flickered my own gaze to our father. The Baron did not seem to have heard me, or rather did not seem to care.

He was a concern. Near-catatonic since the fighting, but I knew for a fact that he was aware of Qaigor’s injury. Unlike so many others at the refinery, I had never had an excuse to keep him from being made privy to it. I had tried to broach the topic with him and failed each time. If my father decided to start talking about his son’s miraculously regrown eye, it could be…problematic.

Would people dismiss him out of hand? The ramblings of a lunatic whose mind fractured when he lost his limb and his dignity? I could certainly hope so, but I did not like relying on hope.

Pragmatism told me to kill him. My emotions reminded me how much that would hurt my mother, Victoria…Qaigor, the little boy now grinning up at me as we flew down to his home.

I had told Sethira I intended to let the mortal, human parts of me inherited with this new body hold sway, at least for a while. I was a creature of my word. The Baron would live for now.

The Vornholt Estate had not, objectively, changed much since I last set foot on it, but the whole place looked utterly pitiful to my eyes now. That was a natural consequence of my own success. Rather than make my territories and lands big, it seemed only to have made the rest of the world small.

I smiled as we set down near the garden. I had experienced this very same effect once before, long ago, as I found out how diminutive the village of my birth really was. That it could affect me so deeply a second time was interesting, to say the least.

My vehicle was not exactly a stealth craft, and of course the whole mansion already knew it was touching down long before any part of it even approached the gardens. I was careful and took my time in lowering it, too, giving the mansion’s occupants ample chance to gather outside and meet us as we disembarked. No sooner had I planted my feet down on solid ground than I was impacted by a blonde, wriggly projectile moving fast enough that it would likely have knocked my old body prone.

“You’re okay!” Victoria squealed as she wrapped her arms around me.

I found myself struggling not to reflexively jerk myself out of her grip. I was strong enough now that doing so would carry a very real risk of injuring the girl. Victoria, of course, took this exactly the wrong way.

“And you don’t mind being hugged anymore!” she grinned, speaking more quietly now so that only I could hear her. I gently took the girl’s arms from me and made a bit of space between us, but could not help but smile.

“It is good to see you again, Victoria.”

She scowled at that. “Don’t do that. That’s creepy. Like watching a rattlesnake smile at me.”

That made me laugh. A sudden impulse I would have bottled up just a day ago, now let loose. When I finally stopped I saw that both Victoria, and my mother, were staring at me with concerned expressions.

“I am fine,” I told them, pre-empting the inevitable questions. “I have simply had…an epiphany recently.”

That clearly did not answer their real questions, but it assured them both that I was not in imminent danger of a mental breakdown.

Or rather, it convinced Victoria at least.

My mother remained concerned, I thought, but her concern was distracted away from me by the sight of my father. Elizabeth Vornholt rushed to his side, kneeling down before him and placing her hands upon his.

“Oh Gods, my love, what did they do to you!?” she croaked. It was probably the exact wrong thing to say, because Baron Agrian turned away from her pity with the most humiliated look I had ever seen him wear.

“We must get you inside,” my mother added urgently, seemingly torn for a moment between her children and her husband. “Isabel,” she said at last, “we will speak more later, you understand I need to…”

“I understand,” I assured her, freeing her to leave, and freeing me from her presence. I was somewhat pleased to see her, but she was always a bit much after a long absence. Particularly when danger had been on the horizon before.

I turned back to see Victoria watching our parents leave, all the joy apparently bled out of her.

“Is father going to be okay?” she asked.

“He will live,” I told her. “But his leg is gone for good.” Better to prepare her for that eventuality, I thought it was highly likely that my father would die of old age before I ever got the chance to restore his limb without being obliterated by the Gods of Garamon and their servants.

Victoria was clearly not pleased by the news, but I was proud to see that she bore it with a degree of strength and calm. She did not cry, did not even sniffle.

“It’s good to see you again,” she said at last. Moving onto a different topic when she was not sure she could control herself regarding the current one. Perhaps I had rubbed off on her more than I previously thought.

“It is good to see you, too,” I told her.

“Why are you in Garamon?” she asked after a moment.

I thought about that. Obviously sharing the full scope of my plans would not do, Victoria was far too young to be trusted with such information, and even if she were an adult it is always best to limit the number of people bearing your sensitive secrets. Each new one is an additional point of failure, however much you trust them.

But I did not want to blatantly lie to her either, the girl deserved more than that. Besides, looking at her now, seeing how those big, blue eyes of hers seemed to have widened to dinner-plate proportions, it made me rather reluctant to fully deceive her just for its own sake.

“I am going to be having a tour of Garamon’s museums,” I told her. “Each one in the country, one after another.”

Which was true. I would, in fact, be visiting each of the nation’s many museums. Because that was where Garamon liked to store the pilfered artefacts it considered non-magical and non-dangerous, and I could think of no better start to locating a disguised magical relic than there.