Chương 16: Chapter 15: Gambling On Deception

++Another early lesson of mine was the fine line that needed to be tread when manipulating adults. Being young and seemingly innocent went a long way to lowering guards, but so too did it increase people's sense of humiliation when they knew they had been bested by me. This actually became more significant a concern as I aged; young women who outperform men in their own fields are not received well at all. It is a terribly easy way to make powerful enemies.

++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E I could not rely on getting access to my father's study again, and so I made the most of this one opportunity while it lasted. It also gave me the chance to experiment with a new magical technique I had been working on regarding my aether.

First, I took a sample of his handwriting, one of the responses he wrote and sent to the Winzorth Institute, and laid it out flat, careful to recall exactly where I had taken it from so that I might return it without revealing my hand after I was done. Then I searched it for an example of every letter in the alphabet written in my father's hand. This was harder than may be expected.

Some letters are simply not used often, some are used vanishingly rarely, but there was fortunately a good deal of back and forth in the various messages I could see, which allowed me to slowly find one of each. Then came the next step, highlighting them all in a thin border of aether. I took my time with this, applying excruciating detail and delaying myself only to barricade the main door with a hefty and well-placed chunk of aether. This stage was what would determine the success of all later ones.

My outline needed to be utterly perfect. Fortunately, I was not using the clumsy, physical fingers of my eight-year-old body. By holding my digits just a hair from the paper, I could comfortably extend strands of mana to manipulate it purely with magic. Magic did not tremble, or shiver, and it moved exactly as my steely will instructed. Even with virtually all of my arcane dexterity gone, I doubted there was a surgeon in the world whose hands were so steady.

One by one I filled in the rims of aether with yet more of the stuff, pouring my mana into the space over each letter and letting my border stop it from overflowing, then solidifying it into true aether until, at last, I had a serviceable imprint of each letter as if it were written in my father's hand. Then I stashed them all within a container, made of yet more aether. My exit was careful and slow.

Two more years spent training since my kidnapping had made my aether stronger than it was even in the mansion fight, and then it had already been as sturdy as good quality wood or perhaps softer stone. Still, this was not a solid barrier and the shape itself was far less resilient. I would have to make sure my new stamps were not broken before I got my full use out of them. The first guarantee for that was through making copies the moment I was in my room.

Obtaining ink and paper was easy for me, even if my father did not like it. He grumbled, as usual, about how unladylike the tools were, and made some half-hearted remark about how I ought to be playing with dolls, and I tolerated his idiocy until such time as I was certain I had what I wanted. Then I retreated once again to my room and began working. Aether does not last long as a rule.

Mine was of middling quality at this stage of my existence, with my actual technical skill being vastly above the average magician, but my amount of raw power lacking by a lot. The result was that, with a lot of care, I could weave aether constructs that would take half an hour to begin decaying. If I hurried, like in the midst of battle, this would drop to a few minutes. If I worked on something extremely small however, it could last for as long as two hours. It took me longer than that to finish my work.

Trial and error was the brute force tool of my efforts, constant tries and retries to get down the tempo and cadence of my father's handwriting to the finest detail. It was not enough to simply form individual letters as if he had written them, those letters needed to be spaced in a way that was consistent with his own writing. And, of course, they needed to spell out a message that was convincingly the sort of thing he would write himself.

My biggest concern ended up coming when a knock rocked my door, snapping me from my stupour and barely giving me enough time to swiftly hide the aether and rise to my feet from where I had been writing on the floor. My mother spent a few moments trying the barred door before I dissolved its blockade with a thought, then she walked in with a look of faint disgust, most likely a consequence of her having stepped past Blakely to enter.

"M'lady," Blakely nodded respectfully. Then narrowed his eyes and sniffed.

"Change your perfume did you?"

"Yes!" my mother snapped.

"Not that it's any of your business, you repulsive Cadanichan pervert!" Cadnich was, I had gathered, a city deep in the most industrialised regions of Garamon proper, at the very heart of the Garamon Empire. It was not, despite this fact, at all popular among the other people of Garamon. So far I could only agree with that general sentiment, but I knew better than to trust a sample size of one. That Blakely was some sort of knife-wielding maniac did not mean the rest of his city was.

It only meant that I had a knife-wielding maniac waiting outside my door at night. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. My mother was roughly as satisfied with that arrangement as one might guess. It was my father's choice however, and so she ignored it like she did most other things that were beyond her control and against her desires.

"Isabel, your lesson starts soon, you must head for it my dear." I had not exactly forgotten about that, as much as kept myself from thinking about it. Half of my work was finished so far, and the remaining half would go faster than what I'd done already, now that I had practised my technique and gotten the hang of things. I just needed to make sure that I was able to actually finish.

Doctor Brown's lessons had gone on for more than two hours before, if I was dragged away to one now my aether stamps might crumble away before I returned. Frustration at having timed my forgeries so poorly was a tempting reaction, but would get me nowhere. Better to focus on the here and now.

"I feel sick, mummy," I replied, pushing my pride to one side and doing my best to take on that uniquely pathetic, helpless 'little girl' cadence that was so often successful in getting me what I wanted. My mother was, oddly enough, more immune to it than most. This time I succeeded only in raising one of her eyebrows.

"You seem to be walking around just fine, for a sick girl." It was hardly a leap of logic on her end, but then I had foolishly let myself be blindsided by this conversation. I should have prepared a story in advance. Time to adjust strategy. I dropped my gaze and made a show of embarrassment instead of feebleness.

"I…do not want Agrian to go." I could not see my mother's reaction, but I could hear her sharp intake of breath and somehow sense the way her posture softened as she heard that.

"You will see him again, Isabel," she closed in and ensnared me with a hug, once again forcing me to fight my natural instincts of squirming free of the grip. They would do nothing to persuade her over to my side now.

"Will I?" I asked, deciding to dial up the little girl act, if only for want of better ideas. She cupped my cheek and tilted my head up to look at her.

"Of course," my mother told me, eyes conveying a silent promise.

"... I do not want to go to my class today, mummy. I have never missed one before, please can I have today off? Even just this one class, please?" It was not the most dignified or sophisticated way for Lord Dread to get what she wanted, but it worked. For the next few hours I was free to continue working. The time limit did little to shake me, I was used to working under stricter ones, for more complicated efforts, and with higher stakes.

Fail here and I would be setting back my own education by some irritating amount, fail in the past and I would… well, I would be imprisoned for aeons. But I had already done that, so in retrospect the threat was somewhat muted. I finished my forgery with a good hour to spare, then spent half an hour more scrutinising it for any minor, possibly imaginary imperfections that may haunt me later. There were none, not as far as I could tell.

It looked entirely like a letter written out in my father's own hand, which meant that if it was disbelieved it would be because of the circumstances around its sending. With that seen to, I only needed to work on those circumstances. Fortunately my excuse for being absent from Doctor Brown's lesson was actually helpful here, too, something that I had kept in mind as I coined it.

When I called on my father and requested to speak with him, I was given an audience almost instantly and ushered into his study to see him scowling down at his desk.

"Have you been in here, Isabel?" he asked me. For a moment I was actually shocked by the question, and feared that my interference a few hours before had been discovered. But it was not, my father did not have the tone of accusation about him, he was just asking to try and find some explanation for whatever minor change he was staring at.

"I swear there's something different," he continued with a growl. Then just sighed and dropped back down into his chair.

"Perhaps I'm just paranoid after the…incident." I was not going to miss the chance to move conversation elsewhere, so I hurried into the room and took a few moments to climb up into the chair opposite my father. His office boasted rather large seats, and most adult chairs were already too big for my body. I managed, after seconds of humiliation.

"Now, what did you want to discuss darling?" my father asked. He had that bright, easy smile that always plastered itself across his face when he was talking to me and my mother. I had long since worked out that this was a sign of how lightly he took us, like he was pre-emptively accepting that no serious business would come from a conversation involving a woman. But that could work to my advantage, too.

"I want to go to Winzorth," I told him. He sighed, leaning back and suddenly weary.

"Isabel, I understand you like magic, but I'm not going to send you away from my protection like that."

"I will be safer at Winzorth," I told him.

"You will not be," he snapped, eyes flaring up.

"You are a little girl, you know nothing of the world or its inhabitants, do not tell me how well I can protect our family." There was a warning in his voice, which did little to keep me from angrily firing back some new remark. The truth was that I actually knew quite a lot about the world, both because of my deliberate efforts to study it after my rebirth, and because certain things simply had not changed much.

Certainly, I knew enough to be sure that an organisation like the Winzorth Institute, boasting so many high-level magicians as trainers and teachers, had a great deal of power to offer. And I knew that magical prodigies, perhaps the most valuable thing in the world at any point in history, would be something they were incentivised to protect as best they could.

But I could not argue on those facts without, at best, being dismissed, or at worst inviting a new line of questioning from my father about where I acquired them. I was not entirely confident in maintaining my childish facade if he grew actively suspicious. So instead I just set down my forged letter upon the desk and slid it over to him.

"I snuck into here earlier, daddy," I told him.

"And I wrote that to make it look like your own hand. I was going to pass it on to a coachman by leaving it in with his other orders, it would have told him to transport me to Winzorth alongside Agrian. By the time he received it, the Winzorth Institute would have already been mailed another letter I also made today, accepting their offer to enroll me." I had hoped that being confronted by my capabilities, by how unable he was to actually control me, would sway my father.

Instead his fist came down hard on the table so abruptly that even I jumped back in shock, looking up to see my father's face had twisted into pure rage.

"Out," he spat.

"Out!" I made myself scarce without another word.