Chương 105: Chapter 93 - Haven

++I, of all people, can comment on the ingenuity that is inspired by true oppression, and I saw it in the people of Orapathaqi. At first I took this to be an inconvenience, but… well, fortune can be fickle. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. I was still on mission when I first noticed the tracking device move away from my rooms, and the distraction it caused nearly got me killed then and there.

I felt my shield shimmer and squeal as an inhumanly strong blow found the spot just over my head, then waved a hand to remove both of the attacker's arms while I focused to try and pinpoint my device. Yes, definitely moving. Moving into rebel territory, and moving fast. It was not hard for me to piece together just what was happening. It inspired a new wave of rage. Nesariyah was my underling, and useful to me. More to the point, she was under my protection and had agreed to serve me in exchange.

As I saw it, this effectively made her as good as my property, which meant that kidnapping her was practically an act of stealing. An act of stealing from me. Unacceptable. I could not do anything about it for now, however. I was still stuck on my mission with wretched Bagran and would have to answer inconvenient questions—possibly ending in my being hanged for dessertion—if I simply cut and run now. As infuriating as I found it, I made myself calm and stay on mission.

Fortunately it was not an especially long one, not anymore. Bagran and I had already done the bulk of the killing, all that was left now was to finish our sweep. Effectively playing clean-up. This minimized the odds of my being injured or in any way impaired before I could see about Nesariyah, but it left the whole thing much more frustrating. I knew that the task I was doing now could be handled by people with less than half my power, and yet I was still stuck doing it.

That was, after all, how the army functioned. It mattered little how effective or pressing an order was, only that it was given, and then followed. That core tenet pinned down everything else about the organisation. Not a place for intelligent people to find themselves, but it must have served well as a holding pen for certain types. Fortunately, my mission did not continue forever.

A mere hour after I first took note of Nesariyah's changing location it came to an end and I was, following a tedious debriefing, free to move on elsewhere. I headed right back for my quarters, naturally. Needing to assess the damage before I could do anything else. I did not have tracking effects in my own traps, but I had made them powerful enough that I should have felt the magic going off if they had been triggered. I had not. Sure enough, when I returned I found them all as they had been. That was curious.

Had Nesariyah been snatched from outside of the rooms? No, even then, whoever caught her would have entered to investigate my workstation—that was just a basic principle when dealing with hostile magicians. You gathered information, you studied them. You learned whatever you could. I was half-forming my suspicion when the note caught my eye, a streak of parchment strewn across the table, standing out like blood on white linen. I snatched it up and read fast.

It was not a long read, and I sensed that it had been written via a set of aether stamps—disguising the handwriting of whoever produced it. A small precaution, and that told me, in and of itself, something about my enemy. They were cautious and scrutinous. And they had Nesariyah, but I was increasingly sure they did not have her as a prisoner. There was an ultimatum and a threat, instructions to meet in some warehouse at the edge of the city and to come alone, or else Nesariyah would be killed. And that was it.

I saw no threats for torture or other abuses, nothing that might threaten me without jumping to the irreversible extreme of killing the hostage. It was rarely a good idea to open negotiations by making such a drastic threat, if it was called out then you had no choice but to either lose your leverage or prove you had no intention of carrying out your threats in the first place. Whoever this new adversary was, they were not stupid enough to make such a rudimentary mistake.

I had already suspected Nesariyah was gone of her own volition, this reinforced that suspicion. All that was left now was to take advantage of my enemy's lapse. Because they had tipped their hand, thinking to use a traitor's defection to bluff about having a hostage and lure me into what must surely be a trap. That would not work now, because not only was I prepared for that trap, but I knew exactly where Nesariyah was thanks to my tracking device. This story has been stolen from Royal Road.

If you read it on Amazon, please report it So I needed only to keep them occupied while I headed to her, and I could trivially kill the woman and leave before they extracted any damning information from her. Wait. I had been getting ahead of myself, too. That my opponents had jumped immediately to threatening Nesariyah's life told me something else as well. They knew I did not care for her outside of her utility to my plans.

If there had been any doubt in my mind that Nesariyah had turned traitor, it was erased at that moment. How fortunate for me, then, that I had turned her into such a useful trap. That tracking device was hidden even from her, and by defecting she had now led me straight to my enemies. All that was left was for me to take advantage.

"She will likely try to kill you," Sethira told Nesariyah again as they walked through the base.

"Which is tedious for us. If she were the sort to plan a rescue mission, she would be far easier to trap. As things are there is actually no reason she can't begin her response by simply blasting apart an entire building. In fact she's done that before, even when we had a hostage she cared about sparing." The girl's mouth twitched slightly, into an expression Nesariyah couldn't help but suspect was admiration.

"Ruthless, if nothing else. Ruthless and talented beyond the scope of genius."

"What's wrong with you?" Nesariyah asked her, openly.

"What is fundamentally broken in your head that you can respect someone for thinking like that?" Sethira's face became cold and guarded in an instant. Not angry, more…irritated.

"You ask a lot of stupid questions," she said simply.

"It makes your inexperience especially obvious." Nesariyah was really getting tired of being spoken down to by little girls several years her junior. She was also getting really tired of how powerless she was to do anything but accept it.

"So what do I do now that I've signed up," she asked at last.

"You want me on the front lines, right?" Sethira snorted.

"I'd sooner use a sarcophagus as a dinner table. No, I want you safely behind our lines, moved around often enough to be safe from raids, and training hard. Do you know how long a Garamon magician spends learning to fight with their magic?"

"Months," Nesariyah guessed.

"Years, more often. Those savages don't really do half-measures when it comes to magic."

"They do half-measures when it comes to necromancy." Sethira's eye twitched.

"... Yes, they do. Another example of their idiocy, I suppose." They were standing in one of the bases she'd described earlier, a nice and secure place. But not a pleasant one to stand in. It was unpleasant, because it was in the damned crypts, and no amount of assurance to the contrary was convincing Nesariyah that she was safe within them. It would've been tolerable, if they were the most disturbing thing in the place. They were not.

What unsettled her more was the uncanny control Sethira seemed to have over them, and the lack of a straight answer Nesariyah ever got about it.

"There's old magic in this place," she'd say.

"I've made a study of it." Such a perfectly useless response, it must have been intentional. Which meant she was hiding something. And that was the end of Nesariyah's investigation into the matter. She certainly wasn't about to piss off the only person sheltering her from Garamon, not while surrounded by crypt custodians. She walked, instead. Venting out her nervous energy by looking around. Angry as she was, Nesariyah's curiosity was stronger still.

Stronger now than it had been with Vornholt, maybe stimulated by her finally coming close to making her own decision after so many weeks of meek captivity. Just thinking about that breathed fresh heat into the cooling coals, and lit her hatred right back up. Nesariyah had to admit, there was one true, undeniable advantage to this recent turn, to Vornholt lying and spying on her. It had finally pulled the wool from her eyes and showed Nesariyah the girl's true colours. She'd shown her the rebels' true colours, too.

Nesariyah had spent most of her time with Vornholt being bombarded by second-hand reports of their barbarity and savagery, she'd soaked it up so constantly that she'd almost started to believe it all without even thinking. It had actually tempered her expectations. Now, meeting them, she realised how stupid that had been, and how it was just another example of her weak, easily-led mind. Of course the people defending their home weren't savage animals, they were people.

And of course they hadn't done the things Garamon's bastards claimed they had, that was just a bunch of lies told so that murderous soldiers could sleep easily at night. Nesariyah found more medical stations than torture chambers littered around, many of which were now full and tending grizzly wounds that even she recognised as being magically inflicted. She approached one with a few questions, and received only a glare and a glob of spit at the ground before her in response.

"Traitor," one of the orderlies spat as they moved back to continue their work. That, Nesariyah had to admit, was fair enough. She'd not exactly been a paragon of bravery these last few weeks. She'd even helped Vornholt uncover the secrets of Orapathaqi's magic. Why? Because she'd feared it would all go extinct? Looking around now, she realised how pointless that fear was. There was no chance of total extinction, surely. Not with so many people committed to keeping it alive.