Book 4 Chapter 15: Pursuit

++Incidents of magicians brawling in the streets are rare, but far from unheard of. Fortunately the youthful, impulsive ones who are most prone to such behaviour are also far weaker on average than their more experienced elders. This is, of course, why ‘drunken prodigy’ is about the most efficient phrase for making the blood leave a police officer’s face.++

- A commentary on the troubles of policing so near to the Winzorth Institute, by Constable Borgin.

For a few long seconds I just stared at the mangled structure of the hotel. The emotions I felt upon seeing it were too intense and too strong for me to deal with, and my mind blotted them out. A distraction. A tactical irrelevance. A weakness.

Emotion was a cataract in the eye of strategy and enlightenment, and right now I needed to see with clarity. I took to the air without even realising it and drifted high to the top floor of the hotel, to the penthouse that even now billowed with flame. I swept my gaze over it and soaked up every detail.

The walls had exploded inwards for the most part, but there was a section that had been blasted out. Victoria had put up a fight then. I saw untouched sections of carpet, not marred by debris or dust, which could only have been where shielded magicians stood and cast their magics. The mana involved was bright, but not dense. So it had been a great many weaker attackers, middling mages of limited potential compensating for their own natural inferiority with sheer weight of bodies.

All of this, I assessed in under a second.

My sister’s magic was visible in the maelstrom as a beacon-light. So powerful, even in spite of her youth. Victoria would never be my equal but she was already stronger than most fully mature adults, and picking her out from this rabble was barely a task at all for my own vision.

Even still, I heard a rustle of fabric and the sweeping of air beside me by the time I finished, and turned to see Voret hovering just a few paces away. He looked concerned.

“This was where you were staying with your sister?” he asked me.

I hurled a magic missile at him with enough power to pierce the hull of an ironclad battleship and blast its whole engine to smoking shrapnel. Had he been an instant later there would be nothing left of the man, just drifting tendrils of gore dissipating on the wind, but he seemed to have anticipated the attack and was able to raise a shield in time to meet it.

Not as powerful as Backry Voret, not at all. Even with my missile blocked, the force of it was sufficient to send him spinning back through the air, and the magician was able to arrest his momentum only after it had already carried him several streets down.

“Wait!” he cried as I flew after him. The words barely reached me. With such tight conditions as this, confined to a cityscape rather than a vast ocean, I could not fly faster than sound, but the wind still obliterated almost all the noise around me. He must have been using magic to cut through it.

An unwise tactical decision, he would need every scrap of power he could muster to prolong his life by even a second.

My next missile missed him and detonated high above the city, a great blast that sent cloud vapour bursting apart and punched a great, open hole to the shining sun above. Voret’s shield caught my following strike and burst apart as he flew away with a cry.

“I had nothing to do with this!” he roared, arcing towards the ground now. I had him. Either he would put enough power into a frontal shield to survive my next blast, or his body would hit the street unimpeded and break apart like so many twigs wrapped in so much tissue. I closed the distance to see it more clearly.

“We’re closer to having you marry into the family than ever, why would we throw that away!?” he desperately cried.

Those words were the ones that saved his life. I was half a second away from firing my final blast and smashing him down into the pavement when they sunk into me. Too late to abort my powers, I simply directed them to one side and watched a crater the size of a house erupt into the stonework beneath him. He landed a moment later, hitting the ground hard but surviving unscathed now that he could direct his magic to cushioning the fall.

I came down right after him, absorbing the impact with a mere bend of my knees, too angry to consider that I may wish to hide my new warrior’s nature until after I had already done so.

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Voret fortunately seemed too concerned by his own brush with death to have noticed. He lay there for a moment, panting for breath before regaining the power of speech.

“I trust…I trust you believe that I wasn’t involved?” he asked cautiously.

“I do,” I told him.

There were people screaming. That was not good. My little outburst had lasted mere seconds, but with the level of power I now wielded it had already done as much damage as an artillery barrage.

It had been impulsive, reckless and stupid of me to lose control like that, but I would deal with the consequences later. Victoria was still missing.

“I can track her,” I began quickly, cursing myself silently for having already wasted precious moments in my outburst. The trail was now that much colder. “Whatever Institute they are affiliated with, I will find them.”

“This almost definitely isn’t on the behalf of an Institute,” Voret told me. “You’re far too prominent for that now. I’d wager they have a buyer set up to take her overseas.”

“Buyer?” I snapped, now hurrying back to the site of Victoria’s kidnapping, or more specifically the streets outside it. Voret hurried after me.

“My guess is she’ll be shipped off to…somewhere. Maybe press-ganged into a foreign army, maybe…uh, married. To…you know. Magical children.” He sounded as awkward as he was disgusted, while I just burned with rage and focused on searching.

With so much of my own magic in the air it was almost hard to find the trail. Almost. But there are precious few things in all of creation that can hide from the eyes of Lord Dread, and those were as strong after my reincarnation as they ever were before it.

I could see their numbers, their bearing and even that my sister’s magic was intermingled. That knowledge pleased me. Victoria had been putting up a fight even as she was dragged away. I started to drift into the air to begin pursuit when I felt Voret join me over the ground.

“What are you doing?” I demanded irritably. He was rapidly eroding what little fondness I had developed for him. It was bad enough that I had already exposed my jugular, attacking him in broad daylight might well ruin my political and financial future. Was he intending to mock me?

“They kidnapped a child,” Voret said icily. “I’m going to help get her back. I can’t fly as fast as you and if I lag behind, don’t wait for me, but I’m going to do the best I can to help out in whatever fight comes from this.”

I did not know what to say to that, but I did not have anything to say either. My current situation overshadowed any back and forth we could possibly have. Without wasting another second I shot out into the air and tore across the sky in pursuit of my sister. Every moment I spent without my hands around her kidnapper’s necks felt like another eternity in the Depths.

Ordinarily it was difficult to pursue magicians by just the aftermath of their magic, the stuff degraded far too quickly. More quickly than most humans could move. This general rule of magic, clearly, did not hold true for those with the power of flight.

Things soon complicated themselves, however. I found myself seeing not one trail but several, and cursed as I realised, of course, that my sister’s kidnappers had known just what order of genius was likely to pursue them. They had taken the time to split off and produce false trails, leading my senses astray.

Ordinarily, this would not have been an impediment at all, but the brief time that had already passed left each trail so degraded that the petty skill involved barely seemed to matter.

I was like an expert tracker attempting to discern trails through a woodland shortly after several nearby volcanic eruptions had submerged the whole thing in magma. Even my eyes had their limits, and this was close to them.

But then I caught sight of the one thing I knew they could not replicate—Victoria’s mana, still lingering at the core of one trail.

I laughed, then put on another burst of speed as I followed it. It was getting easier, not harder, to make out the particulars of the magic now that I was not slowing down so much to differentiate between multiple routes. A sure sign that I was closing in on my enemy, reducing the time between them passing over a part of the city and me passing it myself.

Closer. Closer. Closer still. They must have been moving quickly, because I crossed twenty miles and even came to the city’s outskirts before reaching them.

Perhaps this was the advantage they enjoyed by not being affiliates of an official Institute. Without such a prestigious name attached to them, they had no name to drag down should they be caught. The risk was low, and so there were more men and more magic. A sprinting horse would have been left horizons behind them.

But I was not a sprinting horse.

Only a few more moments passed before I caught sight of my enemies physically, rather than just magically, and then the gates of hell yawned wide open for them.