Chương 118: Chapter 104 - Heating Trail

++I had been over-confident and sloppy during my first rebellion against the Gods, not properly learning the kind of subterfuge needed for such an inherently asymmetric rivalry. I did learn this following my rebirth, but not right away. I still needed to practice. There were some early disasters as a result of this. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. Laiel had been missing sleep, which was neither good nor avoidable.

The more he continued this work, the more certain he grew that Isabel Vornholt's family would find out somehow. Her brother had already caught him trying to investigate the girl's quarters, right? Which meant there was already one Vornholt aware. He should've given it up, cut and run. He should've decided that not getting his dick skinned was the better part of valour. But the army didn't attract men who were prone to wise and risk-averse decision making.

Laiel saw his chance for social ascension, and he saw a lifetime of drudgery waiting if he missed it. The arithmetic was simple. He knew it was simple because he'd run through it a hundred times already, doing so again was practically his pastime of choice at this point. That didn't mean he liked it. Laiel asked around and compared different accounts, and found that doing either was nightmarishly tedious, and doing both even worse.

It wasn't that Vornholt was some master of subterfuge and stealth, though she'd certainly made at least some effort to cover her tracks, just that Laiel was trying to get hard witness statements about one of the most confusing periods of the city's history. You could do practically anything during a siege, and if anyone even knew, they certainly wouldn't be able to produce sufficient testimony for it to be decided in court.

Not that Laiel would be using a court just yet, he just needed hints he could extrajudicially follow. The harder evidence would either come later… or he was fucked. But Agrian Vornholt had already caught him, that's what it came down to at the end, and if the boy himself didn't have the proof to move against Laiel just yet, that wouldn't stop his family forever. As of that meeting at Vornholt's quarters, Laiel was working on a time limit. Nothing new there either.

Time limits were how he measured out his days, more or less. It was just that this one might either ruin or end his life once it expired. He struck gold shortly into his second day, wandering around and asking eyewitnesses about Vornholt. Two separate people corroborating her moving through a specific area. A small hint, but a useful one. He brought out some maps and put it to work.

With only an arrival time and probably travel speed for her meeting with Nu'chista, Vornholt's original starting location had been an unknowable factor. Now, though, Laiel had a rough appearance at a rough time during the night before. It was very broad and vague, with lots of wiggle room caused by the inherently imprecise nature of the human memory, but even still it immediately ruled out more than ninety five percent of the places he'd still had left to look. The remaining twentieth or so was…

not as small an area as he might have hoped, but then if nailing nobles to the wall were easy, Garamon's parliament would already be filled with Highmages. If nailing nobles to the wall were easy, Laiel would've happily made a career out of it. With his options so limited, Laiel chipped away at what remained for the next few days. He visited cellars and warehouses, old abandoned structures and even the occasional attic. Mostly the stronger built things, though.

He prioritised areas with a lot of sturdy buildings, figuring that Vornholt would've wanted somewhere secure to stay during the night of the siege. He knew he had. As usual, it was long and tiring work, but Laiel was suited for it. Smarts could get you far in life, but he never had too many of those. What he did have, what got people a lot farther, was patience, and he used that patience now, piling it into the blaze of his search and narrowing the remaining area down one building at a time.

He let himself fall into a trance, almost. The mental effort of it consuming him until only his job remained. It wasn't really that much different from paperwork. About as mentally strenuous as taking a shit, and an unending task that turned every hour into a homogenous mulch of chronology even more bland and banal than the last. A monkey could've done it. But that was the true power of patience. Given enough time, it could erode any problem. Laiel put enough time into it.

In-between his work managing the men below him, and finding ways to kick problems downhill to free up yet more afternoons, he slowly chipped away at everything until only one last piece was missing from the whole design. Luck. The good thing with luck was that it was really just a game of odds, try enough times and you'd get your due. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

Laiel tried enough times, and on the fourth day he stumbled onto a relatively intact warehouse that would change his life. At first he didn't know what he'd found, except that it was more or less the exact structure he'd have expected Vornholt to reside in. This alone didn't mean it was his prize of course, he'd investigated a few better buildings that would've served her ends better. She might've just not found this during the night of the siege and settled for a worse one.

The interior didn't boast any more clues than that, either. Not at first. Laiel took a long while studying its interior to even suspect he'd stumbled onto his goal at all. It was, at first glance, a normal warehouse. Normal for Orapathaqi anyway, where the weather forecast as of several months ago had mostly consisted of explosive shells.

The stonework was sandy coloured but deceptively hard, clearly picked out from local quarries with care to ensure the construction was sound, and despite the obvious traces of damage to it the overall building was fine. The ceiling was low, which left the place feeling cramped and unnerving. Laiel was experienced enough in the army by now, though, to know that this feeling and the instincts responsible for it were dead wrong.

The building was cramped because its creators had known that longer planes and taller towers would only suffer more from any exertion against them. Stone didn't do well against tensile forces, and the more impressively grand workings made from it tended to be deceptively fragile. Chunks of mortar and rock littered its interior, and everything was carpeted with dust.

Each step Laiel took, even now, long after it had last been inhabited, kicked up a bit of debris from the ground to drift and waft around through the air. Breezes periodically ran through its windows and cracked walls to enact gravity-defying effects on the loose granules. If he stayed here too long, he might cough up a lung. That'd be just his luck; his search for evidence against Isabel Vornholt interrupted by aged lungs finally giving in after decades of combat.

But Laiel wasn't doomed for such an ignominious end, at least not today. His eye caught something in the corner, vision snagging on it like trailing fabric snatched by a jutting nail. Laiel turned to aim a more focused stare over at the sight. Piled stone. Some of it in big, largely intact slabs, other parts broken and crumbled by natural damage. This section of the room didn't look any odder than the rest. Sure, there was more fallen stone here, but so what?

There had to be more fallen stone somewhere, it didn't mean anything that it was here instead of somewhere else, right? Wrong. Laiel couldn't put his finger on why, so he circled the sight. No traces of mana, none at all. No surprise there though, it had been months after all. Vornholt could've conjured up enough power to kill a fleet of battleships and it would've been mostly dispersed by now. It wasn't anything magical he was picking up on, so what was it? This was infuriating.

The problem with instincts was they just didn't quit. Nothing bugged Laiel more than a suspicion unchecked, like a hot needle sitting at the base of his skull, doing nothing but distracting him. What the hell was it? Laiel realised it all at once, and the sensation was very much like having a syringe full of icy water injected right into his brain. There were so many pieces of stone piled here, long slabs and jagged chunks both, and by the looks of things all had been chunked messily from the overhanging ceiling.

Not naturally though. He turned, slowly, looking around and examining the rest of the room. None of it looked too badly damaged. Some parts were cracked, but none shorn free, and as far as Laiel could tell the only damage remotely approximating a shell impact was in that first corner. That isolated corner, with walls and roof kept fully intact, save for right above the pile.

Because someone had dislodged all that stone on purpose to make a shelter at the centre, and they'd kept the rest of their building undamaged to avoid weakening it in case of a stray shell hitting. His heart was racing now as he studied the scene more, scent of the clue filling his nostrils like a shark picking up spilled blood. Whoever had done this was powerful. More powerful than even a typical battlemage.

The breaks were too clean for anything less, this wasn't the work of hours' effort chipping away at it, someone had come here and unleashed enough raw power to fracture great boulder-sized shards of solid rock with individual blasts. There were maybe twenty magicians in the army who could've done that, Laiel just so happened to be one of them, but he knew there weren't twenty people who'd been sighted in this region. It was Vornholt. Had to be. Luck and patience had done their work, and now he was on her trail.

Laiel moved to the pile, calling on his mana and getting to work. He regretted once again how bad he'd always been with aether, right about now the ability to create his own support pillars would've been very useful. Instead he was limited to just hardening and moving around dense patches of air. Not nearly as good for staving off great weights or impacts, and much harder to control.

The delicate nature of his investigation here forced him to work with an agonizing slowness for fear of destroying irreplaceable evidence. Patience and luck. They were the eternal saving grace of a man without the power to reshape the world around him. Fortunately, Laiel had both, and he managed to slowly displace enough of the pile that he could make out what it had been dumped around. Nothing. Well, that was inconvenient. Something of an obstacle to the whole investigation he dared say. Just an obstacle though.

Patience and luck. And paying attention, that particular boon could never be overstated. Laiel was here months after the original occupant had left, just because the space was empty now, didn't mean it'd been empty when it was first made. The question was, what sort of stuff could've fit here? Laiel had his suspicions, and he had another crumb on the trail to keep him chasing after them. He headed out of the room at a brisk pace and started for the nearest of the reliable eye-witnesses he'd spoken to.

This time, he'd ask about Vornholt's time moving around with her servant.