Chương 148: Book 3 - Chapter 9: Complications

++The diversity of human thought has always amazed even me, and has grown, if anything, greater in the days since my mortal life. With so many people now spread across the globe, there has never been a wider net of cognition cast. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. I was confused at the look upon Blakely's face, then worried, then, for one moment, shot through with a jet of panic as he actually spoke.

"Necromancer," he spat.

"You're a necromancer, you probably eat kids and chase women through public parks at night." I froze, mind whirring before…no, he had not worked anything out, this was just another one of his delusional episodes.

"I am not," I told him evenly. He glared at me, face twitching. Then he got a sort of tortured look on his face, the kind worn only by a man who is simultaneously feeling great pain and desperately trying to keep others from seeing. He turned away from me just a second too slowly to hide it.

"Right, yeah, you're…not, sorry," he sounded more taken up in his own mind than fearful of any possible consequences for offending me. Perhaps he simply did not fear me as much as he ought to. The face of a seventeen year-old girl, I must admit, is not terribly intimidating.

"How did your survey go?" I asked him as I began heading for the mouth of the leyline cavern. Like most leylines, it was subterranean. There were many theories for why this was, but the most commonly accepted was that they did not gravitate to the underground at all, simply ran along the earth before focusing their power at equidistant points between the great magical paths.

Those points tended to be at roughly sea level, the 'true' average altitude of the planet's surface, and so when they appeared on dry land, which was usually elevated hundreds or thousands of feet above that, the result was quite a deep burial. The fact that such an obviously correct solution had ever been doubted was simple evidence of how cripplingly anthropocentric the average human, even the average magician or scientist, truly was.

It had taken a thousand years to occur to anyone that the leylines's altitudes were not organised in accordance with our own natural habitat. I did not intend to make that sort of mistake, which was why I had sent my twitchy bodyguard out to survey my new territory and report any oddities. The world was mine, and it would bend to my will, but not because of any great inheritance from the Gods or the universe. The world would serve my ends only because I would change it until it did so.

"Nothing much to report," Blakely told me, giving a quick and well-worded rundown. I was actually impressed. Military men learned quickly to talk fast and efficiently, but few of them were as swift in conveying facts as Blakely was then. I was also pleased, it seemed my own judgement of this land as suitably defensible was being seconded by a veteran defender.

"Then all is going well," I smiled to myself as I said it. There were still holes, problems. My pocket dimension was among the biggest. Now that I had opened a rift to it in the leyline here, an especially observant wielder of magic—arcane or divine—could detect that opening and force it apart. They might locate Nu'chista. I would have to be careful about anything that may lead attention to that spot, in the future. But for the time being, it seemed all was going well.

"I think I can work with this," I said, thinking aloud.

"I think this is the start of—""SHIT!" Blakely roared, then tackled me with his stupid apeman body and smashed the breath right out of me. He had not been moving at five metres per second, and my shield did not quite trigger before my lungs were squeezed empty and my body slammed down into the dirt. I stared up at him through teary eyes as he snarled and drew a long knife. My mind raced. He was about to cut my throat.

My mana was clumsily ignoring efforts to grab it, a single second's opening coming at the worst possible time. Was he about to kill my mortal form? He was not. A moment after the tackle, I heard something else whip over our heads, cutting right through the space we had just been occupying. So fast, invisibly fast, it left no physical trace of itself except the noise, and I took a moment to realise what it had been. Gunfire?

More gunshots screamed at us after that, but by now my mana was back in my hands and I threw up a shield that caught the solid slugs. Solid aether akin to solid iron, translucent enough that I could see the rifle rounds splintering and flattening as they struck its far side, flaking off flat planes of the magical material and depositing granules of ruined lead or steel where they hit it.

"What the fuck is going on!?" Blakely demanded of me, now having scrambled away from atop me to scurry over and crouch behind a fairly large boulder. He had his rifle already drawn, head down, body curled. The thought that struck me was some predatory feline on the verge of a pounce. Stolen story; please report.

"I do not know," I told him, getting to my own feet. I was not nearly so fast or dextrous as him, but I compensated with a burst of force to fling me up. Then I turned. There were at least a dozen men down from us in the cave, between me and the exit. They were all shooting save for two. Each shooter had a rifle, the two men who did not were setting up… a machine gun.

The very same variety my father had once turned against kidnappers in our mansion, except this time the belt feeding it stretched for several yards and looked to hold five hundred rounds instead of two. Each cartridge seemed half again as wide as the ones I had once seen unleashed in my mansion. Would my shield weather that? I decided it would not be in my best interests to find out. The aether was crumbling, but instead of reinforcing it I focused my attention on setting up a new wall.

The first had been braced against the cavern, made in blindness and haste by an ambushed magician who had not wanted to suddenly find their own shield smashed into them should any warriors attack it. Now, I relied on the aether's own weight to lock it into place before improvising an adjustment on my half-finished flying charm. Gravity began to lose its hold on the shield, and the aether drifted slightly upwards into the air. Static friction was taken care of.

Now I just added the force needed to send it rushing towards my enemies. The cave widened out the closer to its mouth one got, so I did not need to worry about my barrier suddenly catching on jutting parts of the walls. Air resistance was a more significant concern, with aether's natural lightness making it a great barrier, but even with that my raw power was now enough that, by the time the wall had reached the first of the men, it was already moving faster than any normal human could run.

And sheer size gave it a lot of momentum. Bones broke, blood spilled, bodies tipped back and spun through the air and in mere moments I had cleared out the whole cave right up to its entrance, sending men and machine guns alike flying and tumbling out of its mouth to sprawl in the mud. I was emerging from the tunnel before any of them could stand.

"Fucking hell," Blakely cackled behind me.

"Are they dead?"

"I do not know," I sighed. Some certainly were. I had been rather wrong-footed by the ambush, and had used an excess of power in retaliating. A few of the corpses looked rather like a giant child had picked them up and rotated various body parts in different directions. Blakely grunted at that, shuffling out and prodding one of the still-living men with his gun barrel.

"Leave him alive," I told my bodyguard.

"I have…questions."

"I know," Blakely rolled his eyes.

"I'm not an idiot." That much was true, I had to concede. He was just utterly unpredictable. I hurried to the wounded enemy before my subordinate could do anything inconvenient and irreversible. Unfortunately, it was not in my own hands. By the time I reached the man he must have bitten down on something, some capsule in his mouth, because I saw the eyes roll into the backs of his head and his throat begin convulsing. He started to choke and spasm.

I almost switched to lord Dread on reflex, knowing the magical power of my lich's state would enhance my healing abilities to an extent that may well save him. But Blakely was still here. Was I willing to just kill the man for his silence? No, that would cause immense friction with my father. Unless I used the assassination attempt as an excuse for his death? I would need to make it look like he fell to gunfire… While I deliberated, the man grew red, then purple, then blue.

I looked around and saw his allies were undergoing a similar transformation. Foam began to build in their mouths and froth from their lips, and their spasms were getting weaker by the moment. Within a minute, I was standing amid a mass of corpses. Blakely spat at his feet.

"Every one of them killed themselves, just like that. Nutters." I decided not to comment on what had to be one of the most ironic statements I had heard in thousands of years, and instead focused on my present situation. It had already been upturned by the unexpected attack, but now that attack had ended and left me with the most inconvenient thing any plan could possibly be afflicted by. An unknown variable.

"This was planned well, given the short notice of us arriving here," I thought aloud.

"Planned very well," Blakely agreed.

"They knew to pinch you in the cave. Not sure why they waited for me to go in though. Flat ground everywhere around here, if they'd tried to plug me with a rifle while I was walking in the open I'd probably just be dead." That was…a good point.

"Their intelligence was flawed then?" I suggested.

"They knew the lay of the land, and about the cavern, but not that you were here with me." That, itself, suggested a lot. It meant—"They didn't follow us from Lachfel then," Blakely vocalised the thought before even I could. I found myself staring at him. I was a lich. My mind moved more quickly and consistently than any mortal's. Yet he had just beaten me to the intellectual punch.

For that to happen did not imply anything as mundane as intelligence, because no mortal could be that intelligent, but simply that his own thoughts, turned to matters of attempts on his life, had to operate at an almost sub-instinctual level. It was at once disturbing, and quite reassuring.

"Correct," I said at last.

"And given the haste these men had to end their lives before being interrogated, it is almost certain they were not acting alone." People who were willing to do this sort of thing were often followers, not leaders. And there would be little to gain from them keeping me from learning their motives unless there were others still out there to carry them out. I had a new problem on my hands, a new danger, and a new mystery to unravel. All this at once, and I had yet to even begin setting up my refinery.

Things in Poloira were looking to be interesting if nothing else.