Book 4 Chapter 39: Enticement

++There are few things any magician will not do for power. People are always shocked at the lengths our greatest prodigies go to in warring with one another, and yet this bafflement could be abated if one only considered that simple, known fact more deeply. If any magician will do drastic things for any power, then merely think what the mightiest of us might do for ultimate power.++

- Quote attributed to Aadan Farah, 1832 A.E, supposedly given as justification for him drunkenly carving his own visage into the side of Laugrey Bridge.

The Vorets had been as good as their word. Or, rather, as good as their contract. Even still, I had been watching them. I scrutinised everything, double and triple-checked their accounts, their appearances, their spending and purchases, whatever they chose to hoard or guard or anything else that may be relevant. I consumed information on them with all the voracity of a starved ant nest.

I did this, because I needed them to be a known quantity. I needed to be sure of having accounted for each and every possible surprise that might pertain to them.

One had to be cautious like that, when one was planning on sharing illegal magic.

Exyria Voret, for once, was flying to visit me, and would be doing so in my own office. I did not hold an official position in the Vornholt Institute’s staff, but as its ‘founder’ and ‘proprietor’ I had been granted a rather large space to call my own.

Ludicrous. ‘Granted’ as if I had not built the place myself! In any case, it was spacious and convenient, and made me look suitably important. More important yet, it was sectioned off out of other people’s way in the Institute, so I did not have to worry about my things being observed, scrutinised or touched. The privacy let me do essentially as I pleased.

I did not have Sethira hogtied on top of my desk right now though, because this meeting with Voret would prove far too important for such distractions.

Exyria entered with an air of grand significance, and it took me a moment to realise that she had actually conjured up magical winds to leave her hair lightly billowing and the air rippling ahead of her as she walked. It was an amusing bit of theatre, though the effect was spoiled. I was skilled enough with my new Vessel that there were now precious few magicians in all of Garamon who could hide something from my arcane eyes, and probably none without at least a moderate risk of being seen through.

She took her seat opposite me, while the door swung shut on its automatic, magical hinges to isolate us. The office was paradoxically quiet and loud; insulated from the outside world in such a way as to cut off all sound, but only making every noise that came from within seem all the more significant as a result. When Voret spoke, her voice sounded almost like gunfire.

“You’ve done well for yourself, grand daughter in law.”

I frowned. “I thought I was your great grand daughter in law.”

My possibly-great grandmother looked suddenly irritated. “Oh, I don’t even know anymore. There’s a new blonde haired brat in this family every month and they’re all nearly identical. Pick one, I don’t care.”

It was literally the most endearing thing I had ever heard her say. Perhaps her guard was lowering now that I was legally bound to the family.

Or perhaps she just wanted me to think that.

“In any case, I am not finished with my plans yet. This is just the start of it all,” I told her.

“Yes, I can see that. You’re really confident this will take off though? You’ve never run an Institute before, as I hear it you barely even attended Winzorth and mostly just spent your time consuming literature.”

“That is true,” I was forced to concede. “But I am leaving most of the running of this one to others.”

I could not mention, of course, that I actually had more experience training apprentices than any mortal ever had. I had taken them on infrequently and selectively over my long life, but that life had stretched on through enough ages that sheer length meant the brief windows of teaching added up.

I could make tweaks to curriculums and choice suggestions, but it was a shame I could never show the full extent of my knowledge.

“You didn’t call me here just to share your achievements though, did you?” Voret asked. “And I doubt very much that you enjoy my company enough to have just wanted a chat. Why was this so urgent?”

So help me, I actually felt almost nervous. This was a big thing I was about to do. A lurching step, not just forwards, but over the proverbial edge. It was my point of no return.

I had tied myself to the Vorets through legal documentation and ensured that our reputations were intermingled enough that they may well face destruction if I were to be branded a traitor. Now I had to make use of that preparation.

“You are…old,” I told her. “How many more years do you think you will live? Twenty, thirty perhaps?”

All the friendliness drained away from her. “Taunting me now?” she asked.

“I am asking you a question. It is important.”

“I don’t give it much thought,” she lied. I had seen the effect of age on magicians before, there was not one of us who did not give it much thought.

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“You are stupid, then?” I asked her. “Your life is more than half over, and you have not given much thought to what you will do with what remains of it?”

She sneered at me. “Are you about to suggest that I put you in my will or something, is that it? I thought you were less clumsy than that.”

I took the hostility with a smile. “No,” I told her. “I am about to ask you whether you want to live forever.”

She frowned at me. First confused, then thinking, then realising, and then I saw horror on her face. “You’re a necromancer,” she whispered. The word was so quiet even I barely heard it from just across my desk.

“No,” I told her. “I am something much safer, and much better.” I decided the best way to explain what I was talking about would simply be to show her, so I took a look around my desk. It did not take more than a few moments to locate something suitable for my demonstration; a rather thick drinking glass.

It was sturdy enough that, when I broke it to pieces with an idle flex of my fingers, I knew it was quite an impressive display of strength. Voret stared, but did not gasp or show any other great shock. That was to be expected of course. I had not done anything superhuman yet.

My magic caught the glass shards, then heated them into slag. Then I gathered up the molten globules with telekinetic thought and molded them back together, rapidly excising the heat and leaving a pristine, perfectly spherical mass of glass just a few times wider than my fingertip.

“Do you know what the structural strength of glass is?” I asked Voret.

“Roughly the same as stone,” she replied mechanically. It was one of the first things anyone learned at the Winzorth Institute’s practical engineering courses.

Which was good, because it meant she had a full understanding of how impressive what I did next was.

I was perhaps half again as strong now as I had been during my little contest with Blakely. Stronger than any ordinary human, male or female, could possibly have become. I estimated that being compressed by my grip was equivalent to having a good thousand pounds of weight bearing down from above.

Even still, it took me both hands wrapped around each other, and quite a fair amount of effort, to finally induce a crack in the glass sphere. From there it broke apart entirely. I actually enjoyed the workout.

The glass went flying naturally, and it was sharp enough that my skin would have been cut to ribbons—were that skin not now equivalent to its own thickness in copper sheeting. I barely even felt myself scratched, and knew the white lines where flesh had yielded would be gone within the day. Voret shielded her face from the flying debris and stared at me wide-eyed.

“I didn’t sense any magic in your hand when you squeezed,” she said with an almost disbelieving tone. “You…did that with brute strength?”

“I am a warrior as well as a magician,” I said, confirming what I imagined her suspicions must have been.

“How?” she asked me, growing almost frantic now, hasty. “How did this happen? It can’t happen, it’s not possible.”

“People keep telling me things are not possible,” I noted with no small amount of amusement. “For this particular impossibility I…made my own body.”

I had to fight not to give into this new body’s urge to wince. Exyria Voret took the news better than I would have expected, but she still flinched back like I had just slapped her.

She took her time in responding, perhaps thinking about her options.

“Give me the details,” she said at last.

I did, minus a few key features. I decided not to tell her about my illegal human experimentation done on a captured Demigod, thinking that she might find that somewhat objectionable, and instead focused purely on the scientific and magical elements of what I had done. Fortunately my studies regarding divine magic had mostly yielded fruit in separate areas anyway, so I could get away with primarily talking about the flesh monster from my laboratory, which I did not need to give a specific origin for.

Of course, what I was describing was so outlandish—so thoroughly beyond the ken of Exyria—that it did not really matter whether I shared my sources or not. It was much like a seventeenth century engineer explaining the workings of a telegram to a caveman. The technological disparity between what the audience could do and what was being described was so vast that the question of its advancement relative to the speaker simply did not occur.

She just listened, and nodded, and grew both more pale and more enraptured as I went on, interrupting only occasionally with questions, all of which I found were enjoyably poignant.

“And you have plans to spread this?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I confirmed.

“To make the whole of humanity as strong as you?”

“No, I cannot do that. Warrior Vessels are tied to the magical Vessels. I am confident that the average person can become a warrior of some strength, but they would likely be very below average by the standards of most people who actually train and become one now. Just as the average person could probably learn some smattering of magic, but never more than putting out a candle from across a room, or perhaps levitating a moderately heavy book.”

She nodded, and I noted that she seemed to ease up at that. It was interesting that she had recognised, instinctively, how dangerous it would be to mass produce an ability that might be perceived as threatening to the Gods.

“My talent, then?” she asked. “I ought to be…what, equivalent to the fourth order?”

“More likely the lower or middle bounds of fifth order,” I noted. “My technique for doing this also makes warriors stronger than they would be if they were ‘natural’.”

That had been thanks to incorporating the techniques I used on Qaigor to make his body channel the mana more efficiently, except that my vat-grown warrior bodies would apply that permanently, without ever pausing. Such a thing had diminishing returns, but it still gave a mighty leg-up over even Qaigor.

I did not need to explain the implications of this to Exyria, naturally.

Magicians are weak and fragile, this is a known fact in every culture that has ever existed. I myself became a rare exception in the past, quite accidentally, when my mutated bones eventually towered to fifteen feet in height, and even then the raw size did little to let me contest the strength of a truly martial-oriented opponent.

A magician who was also a warrior, though? They would be greater by far than the sum of their parts.

“And when I start to die, you can just make a new body, another younger one, to replace my old one, is that right?” Voret asked me.

“Yes,” I confirmed, deciding to leave out that she would need to hide the fact of her immortality from the Gods to avoid being obliterated out of sheer paranoia.

She took a while to respond.

“If what you’re telling me is true, then I will…I will do anything you ask provided you can give me more life.”

I smiled.