Chapter 100 - Investigational Diligence

++The concept of being ‘out-smarted’ rarely applies. It is usually more accurate to say that a supposedly out-smarted person simply made a mistake. Intelligence is useful and versatile, of course, but by far the deadliest mental quality is patience.++

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

Isabel Vornholt’s quarters weren’t exactly hard to find. The little bitch had a taste for luxury that…well, that was completely expected, really, given her nobility.

Laiel didn’t need to really exert his investigational muscles to find out where she’d been bunking, though as he approached the place he was overcome by a strange sense of foreboding. Every step brought the memory of his last confrontation with her bubbling up. The memory of her power.

I’m scared of a damned girl. Now?

He tried to chastise himself, to act like it was ridiculous or embarrassing. All useless.

Isabel Vornholt was barely fifteen, but she boasted the magical prowess of an established Highmage and had not yet shown any signs of stopping her growth. Most prodigies of magic worked just as diligently, there was simply every economic incentive to do so, and Laiel himself drilled to raise his power just as much.

But none of them would ever approach her. That was just nature, just the hand of fate reaching down to humanity and picking out a clear favourite. Barely fifteen, and she’d choked him nearly to death seemingly without even reaching the limits of her strength. If she decided to finish the job, she might get away with it too. Even nobles couldn’t get away with a public murder. But it probably wouldn’t be public.

No shit Laiel was growing apprehensive as he prepared to infiltrate her home, and no shit he was continuing to do it. Because he had his suspicions now, suspicions that, if proven, would propel his career into the damned stratosphere.

What was a little dance with death compared to that?

The building was big and tall, and Laiel’s first thought when he looked at it was ‘secure’. It looked exactly like the dwelling of a magician who’d picked a home based on having something to hide. The sandstone walls were thick and seemed like they’d at least inconvenience a cannon shell, while the roof was as solid as anything he’d ever laid eyes on.

It wasn’t hard to get up to it, of course. There was a balcony only a few floors off the street below, and Laiel’s magic was more than sufficient to launch him up that high. He’d never been as good with aether as most, but a quick jet of fire sent a strong updraft rolling up from below him that slowed his descent enough for safety. So far, so good. He was just turning his attention to the locked door, deciding whether to blow it open or try to more subtly melt its mechanisms, when the thing was unlatched from the inside and swung open.

Laiel nearly blasted Agrian Vornholt on sheer reflex when the boy emerged to glare down at him. He just barely kept his shock in check, but even still the surprise was a nasty one. Nasty enough to leave his brain slowed by uncertainty and confusion.

“What do you want?” the boy demanded.

Somehow, Laiel didn’t have a lie prepared. He should have, this was a distinct but real possibility, and yet eagerness or just plain stupidity had caught him unawares. He scrambled for a suitable one.

“I’m…looking for your sister,” he managed at last.

Vornholt didn’t even blink. “You know she’s missing though,” he snapped. “Kidnapped.”

The official story was that she was only a prisoner, since that gave the army more time before it needed to report the death of a Baron’s daughter and the world’s most gifted magician at once.

Vornholt did not seem to be fooled, judging by his sheer rage. Every word was pronounced like a final accusation itself, and hearing a whole sentence full of them brought mental images of guillotines and shackles to the forefront of Laiel’s mind. Vornholts sure could bully, if nothing else.

But he’d been stared down by meaner than this little shit.

“And I’m trying to find any clues about her whereabouts,” Laiel tried. He leaned to one side and attempted to peek over the boy’s shoulder, but Vornholt simply adjusted his footing to continue blocking the view.

“I don’t believe you. And if I did, I don’t trust you. And if I did…well, I’d be an idiot.” Laiel got the distinct impression that Vornholt was pronouncing every syllable while wrestling with the urge to hit him.

The feeling was more mutual with every passing moment.

“So you’re going to prevent me from following a lead just on some gut paranoia?” he challenged.

“I’m going to throw you off this fucking balcony if you’re still on it in five seconds,” Vornholt retorted.

Laiel called his bluff for half the allotted time, then decided that he’d rather face gravity on his own terms and drifted back down. He made a show of skulking off into the nearby alley, and found that the display came naturally to him. It was partly true after all: this would have been a very useful chance to find out what Isabel Vornholt had been up to. If, as he suspected, she was colluding with the rebels, then there could easily be some hint of the fact in her apartment.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Another thought struck him then. Agrian Vornholt might have found that hint himself, already.

Laiel thought back to the brief conversation and analyzed it from a new lens. Vornholt had been belligerent, even angry. He’d never been a well-tempered lad, but he’d never been quite this aggressive in the past either.

He was Laiel’s subordinate, though judging by this last discussion the boy had finally worked out that the confines of class transcended the chain of command, at least on this lowly level.

There were certainly explanations for his behaviour, given the disappearance of his sister. Laiel couldn’t know for sure that he knew something.

But once again, he had his suspicions. This was looking bigger by the moment. Big enough that he was going to have to be careful. A family like the Vornholts could bring a lot of ruin upon him, if he didn’t ruin them first. That wasn’t a guarantee of failure. Just meant he needed whatever case he built to be ironclad, and ensure that their influence died before they could turn it against him.

Fortunately, Laiel had other means of investigating it than just heading straight to Vornholt’s apartment. He took his time and paid attention to every step, knowing that laziness was the biggest enemy to accuracy in any search. It wasn’t fiendish complexity or subtle track-covering that stopped you from finding the truth most of the time, just your own focus lapsing.

Laiel had learned a lot of things by spending his life at the bottom of the pile, and chief among them was how to keep his focus sharp.

After a few days of constant effort, he was rewarded with progress.

Vornholt wasn’t exactly subtle. She probably hadn’t thought she’d need to be, in a city this big, with so much chaos, it was, indeed, very hard to find information on any one person just because of how much noise there was. Fortunately for Laiel, she’d been doing a few things in some of the areas with less events to drown it out.

He asked around for information on her whereabouts and general position in Orapathaqi over the weeks following its fall, and after hearing no less than four sources point him in the same direction, finally put two and two together and started talking to the priests in charge of contraband disposal.

Priests didn’t like magicians. Laiel would compare them to cats and dogs, except it was possible to train those animals to get along. It wasn’t exactly hard to pinpoint where the animosity came from either.

Priests were just cunts.

They fancied themselves extensions of the Gods, as were the Demigods, but magicians, having a tendency to do stuff like read books and learn facts, saw right through this and recognised them as the semi-useful fodder they were. More to the point, magicians had been steadily increasing in average power and ability by the generation for centuries.

This didn’t mean much to the Demigods, who were so far above them as to not even really recognise a practical difference, but had made the Godtouched priests steadily less useful.

Laiel had known all this for years, though. So it wasn’t really a surprise for him when the bastard priests proved to be almost fully unhelpful. They were tight-lipped by nature, just as magicians were, and formed ranks as soon as he started inquiring about Vornholt’s interests and aims.

That, itself, was interesting, because if some association with her had left them with things to hide then that was a potential point of inquiry too.

For now, it was easier to just use the information he did get. Laiel found out when Isabel Vornholt had showed up asking them for an appointment with Nu’chista, and how long she’d waited. He knew when this appointment had happened, which meant he knew roughly when she’d showed up,

With all that in mind, he could do a lot more legwork to fill in some blanks.

There weren’t many safe places the night of the siege, and Laiel figured Vornholt, an attractive girl with an attractive native girl in tow, would’ve wanted to hunker down in one. No doubt she could’ve killed a thousand rapists in that single night if she’d had to, but he guessed she’d gone out of her way to avoid doing that. If only because it would be hard to explain to the higher-ups.

He looked through maps of the city and tried to pinpoint all the areas that seemed most secure to him, then began walking through them and scrutinising their buildings for defensiveness.

As usual, it was long and tedious work.

That was just army life though, and most of the long and tedious work Laiel did had far less rewards than this. He’d take an investigation to potentially make his career over signing off on the fiftieth disciplinary detail that month for some drunken morons who got caught trying to fist-fight a pig.

A real anecdote, that. And just the sort he was trying to get away from. Hope fuelled him as much as diligence.

Days more passed and Laiel didn’t let up, chewing away at the problem bit by bit. He was the hyperbolic river eroding the mountainside, unrelenting and endlessly patient. There was always more water in the great flow of his attention, and stone was only so strong. Scrape away a nanometre at a time and you’d still get there eventually.

But progress was hard to see. It all came down to a categorical yes or no; had he found where Vornholt was staying the first night, or had he not? Currently that answer was no, rather than yes. And it would remain no until it turned to a yes all at once. A frustrating way to work because it gave him no visual feedback of any kind.

But then, army life had prepared him for frustration, too. And this was nothing compared to waking up every day with the knowledge of his fate, of being certain he’d live and die without ever touching true wealth, just have every scrap of labour squeezed right out of him before being tossed aside when there was none left.

He’d seen that happen. He’d helped it happen. He had no right at all, in fact, to complain that he was getting older now, and had maybe ten years before he felt it happen. Even still, this was Laiel’s life. He wasn’t a decent guy and he’d done nothing to deserve better than any other magician, but maybe they deserved better than this too.

Maybe the best he could do was take care of himself. And if he had to nail down some entitled noble brat to manage it, that was just how things were.

The nailing down was his biggest hitch, though. He kept working at it, never letting himself flinch and never losing hope. Laiel’s advancing age had taught him above all that good things came, not to those who waited but to those who persevered. He persevered, and eventually the good thing came.

He finally narrowed down the safe haven Vornholt had used during the siege.